It was 250 years ago that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. In it, he looked back on the contact that various distant peoples had had with Europeans, following the discoveries of Christopher Colombus and Vasco de Gama. The results, by Smith’s time in 1776,...

A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz sounds like a clean, decisive move until you run it through the real world: geography, international law, ship insurance, and the uncomfortable question of what happens when the other side shoots back. We sit down with Lt Col Karen...