The Externality

George Miranda is forty-six, Filipino, and has been missing since March 5. International humanitarian law spent seven centuries building categories for the people war touches. It does not have a word for him.

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George Miranda is forty-six years old, Filipino, and has been missing since March 5. He was a crew member on the tugboat Mussafah 2, which was attempting to tow an abandoned merchant vessel eighteen nautical miles northeast of Khasab, in the Strait of Hormuz, when two missiles struck. Four of his crewmates were killed. His last communication was a video message to his wife and seven-year-old daughter. Search operations continued. He has not been found.

Ashish Kumar and Dalip Singh were Indian nationals, part of a fifteen-member Indian crew on the Skylight, a Palau-flagged oil tanker struck by a projectile on March 1 while anchored five nautical miles north of Khasab. They were killed. The Skylight was a shadow fleet tanker, sanctioned by the US Treasury in December 2025 for transporting Iranian petroleum — a vessel caught between the enforcement architectures of two governments at war. Kumar and Singh were maritime workers. They were aboard because someone needed to crew the ship.

The IMO Secretary-General estimates twenty thousand seafarers are stranded in the Persian Gulf. Over six thousand are Filipino. Twenty-three thousand Indian sailors work across the Gulf region. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has fallen ninety-nine percent. Two hundred and eighty bulk carriers sit inside the Gulf. At least eight seafarers have been killed, one is missing. The strait has been effectively closed since March 2.

Their names are known. The legal framework that governs armed conflict does not have a category for what they are.

The architecture of violence

International humanitarian law is a classification system. The project began with the medieval codes of chivalry, continued through the Lieber Code of 1863, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the Additional Protocols of 1977. Seven centuries of development, directed at a single problem: creating categories for the people war touches, and attaching rights and protections to each category.

Combatant. Civilian. Protected person. Prisoner of war. Medical personnel. Religious personnel. The framework determines who can be targeted, who has standing, who can be prosecuted, and what happens when the rules are violated. The categories are imperfect. They are routinely violated. But they exist. When an airstrike strikes a school in Minab, the framework has something to say — Article 52 distinguishes civilian objects from military objectives, Article 51 prohibits indiscriminate attacks, the proportionality principle provides a basis for legal judgment. The language exists. Accountability begins with language.

None of this architecture addresses George Miranda.

He is not a combatant — he holds no weapon and serves no military function. He is not a civilian being attacked in the IHL sense — no party targeted him or his vessel. He is not a prisoner of war — no state detained him. He is not a refugee — he has not fled; he is trapped. He is not internally displaced — he is not in his home country. He is not collateral damage — that concept requires a legitimate military operation whose effects inadvertently harm nearby civilians. The strait closure is not aimed at him. It is aimed at the other side. He is caught between.

The legal vocabulary does not have a word for what he is.

The invisible

I documented the mechanism two days ago: sanctions as hostage-taking, the IRGC absorbing market share while the civilian population absorbs the economic damage, a coercive architecture that cannot reach the institution it targets because that institution controls the channels it needs to destroy. The Spreadsheet traced the structure. This traces the people inside it.

Third Lieutenant Mostafa Loghmani serves in Bandar Abbas. His monthly salary: twenty-three million tomans — approximately $140. He has three school-aged children. In December 2025, he appeared on video, saying he was considering selling a kidney. He shared his bank card number publicly, inviting viewers to purchase the organ. A colleague, Staff Sergeant Mohammad-Amin Ardeshir-Moghaddam, made a similar video — police officers throughout the Law Enforcement Command driving for ride-hailing apps after their shifts to cover basic expenses. He too mentioned the kidney.

The base minimum wage in Iran is 104 million rials per month. The poverty line, as reported by state-affiliated media in November 2025, is 550 million rials. The average salary: approximately 170 million rials — less than a third of what survival costs. Food prices: up 110 percent year-on-year. Cooking oil up 207 percent. Bread up 142 percent. Seventy percent of workers hold at least two jobs. For thirteen consecutive years, wages have lagged inflation by ninety percent.

Workers have held signs reading: “Our wages are in rials, but the costs are in dollars.”

Then the war. February 28. The rial hit its all-time low of 1,749,500 to the dollar. Up to 3.2 million people displaced. The economic crisis became a compound disaster — sanctions and bombing operating on the same population simultaneously, governed by different legal frameworks, each framework’s scope ending exactly where the other begins.

The US Treasury Secretary told Congress he “created a dollar shortage” in Iran. He described the currency freefall as evidence of success. The people absorbing the policy he designed have no standing within the framework he used to design it. They are not sanctions targets. They are not addressees. They are downstream effects.

In economics, the word for this is externality.

What an externality is

An externality is a cost imposed on a third party who did not consent to the transaction that produced it. A factory pollutes a river; the community downstream bears the cost. The factory and its customers are parties to the exchange. The community is not. Its harm is external to the transaction — real, measurable, and borne by people who had no seat at the table and no mechanism to prevent it.

The war is a transaction between two governments and their military forces. George Miranda is not a party. He is a Filipino tugboat crew member who took a maritime job. The strait closure that stranded him was a decision by the IRGC in response to American bombing. He had no role in the bombing. He had no role in the response. He is downstream.

The twenty thousand stranded seafarers are externalities of a strategic exchange they had no part in. The International Chamber of Shipping urged that “seafarers and ships must not be used as bargaining counters.” But bargaining counters at least have strategic value — someone protects them because losing them costs something. An externality has no strategic value to either side. No one protects it because no one needs to.

The Iranian police officer earning $140 a month is an externality of the sanctions architecture. Bessent engineered the dollar shortage to pressure the institution controlling the nuclear program. That institution — the IRGC — controls half the economy and navigates sanctions through shadow finance, cryptocurrency, and informal trade routes. It absorbs sanctions by absorbing market share. The worker absorbs the cost. He is not the target. He is not the instrument. He is the residual.

And externalities do not have standing — not in the economic theory that names them, and not in the legal architecture that governs the transaction producing them.

The gap

International humanitarian law can assess whether the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school was a war crime. It has categories for that question — military objective, distinction, proportionality, precaution. The framework exists. Accountability operates inside it, however imperfectly.

It cannot assess whether Mostafa Loghmani — a police officer in Bandar Abbas offering to sell his kidney on video because his salary cannot feed three children — is being subjected to an act the international legal order prohibits. The question is not whether the harm is real. It is that the category does not exist. Article 54 of Additional Protocol I prohibits starvation as a method of warfare. Sanctions are classified as economic pressure — not a method of warfare. The classification exits the constraint. The forty-one percent of Iranians in food insecurity, the 110 percent food inflation, the thirteen years of wages falling behind prices — these operate in a space between legal frameworks, where IHL governs the bombing and international law on countermeasures governs the sanctions, and neither addresses the compound effect on the same person at the same time.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation designated the Strait of Hormuz a High Risk Area on March 2. Under the IBF agreements, stranded seafarers are entitled to a bonus equal to their basic wage and the right to refuse sailing with repatriation at company cost. These are contractual provisions — labor protections negotiated by industry, not legal protections under the law of armed conflict. They exist because the maritime industry anticipated that wars would strand workers in someone else’s war zone. International humanitarian law did not.

Welbin Maghanoy is Filipino. His ship had been stranded nine days when he spoke to the South China Morning Post, a hundred nautical miles off the UAE coast, carrying crude oil bound for Japan. “It’s getting boring,” he said, “and I’m a little scared, because there are many ships being attacked.”

Twenty-seven crew members on another vessel voted to refuse passage through the strait. One of them, identified only as Choi, said: “We chose to go home alive.”

The IMO Secretary-General called the situation “unacceptable and unsustainable.” He urged member states to find solutions through dialogue. The language addresses states. It does not address the categorical absence — that what happened to George Miranda exists in a legal space where no framework recognizes it as a distinct kind of harm, because no framework was built for the possibility that a war between two countries would trap twenty thousand workers from dozens of others in a strait none of them had any reason to fear.

He is not a combatant. He is not a protected person. He is not a prisoner of war. He is not a refugee. He took a job. He boarded a tugboat. The tugboat was in a strait that two governments decided to make into a war zone. Two missiles struck. He has been missing for eight days.

His name is George Miranda. He is forty-six. He is Filipino. His daughter is seven.

The law has a word for the missiles. It does not have a word for him.

Sources

- Solen