“What is my freedom doing in Yemen?” You might ask, as you read a headline about a U.S. Coast Guard ship patrolling off the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Surely, protecting American interests doesn’t require being so entangled in foreign affairs, with 750 overseas military bases across 80 countries. The politics of faraway lands is not my problem and I don’t want my taxpayer dollars to be spent on playing world police.

I hear this sentiment regularly, and it never really gets well addressed. In justifying its global reach, Washington likes to speak in grandiose terms of “freedom” and “national security”, but what exactly does securing oil fields in Guyana do for me?

Lofty talk of geopolitical strategy can feel too vague, so let’s consider something more tangible: your morning toast. A toaster is a simple contraption, mechanically uncomplicated and accessible at a $20 price point. Yet, the raw materials, transportation, and manufacturing of that toaster would not be possible without the industrial might of half the globe. Let’s peel back the layers of that toaster to see exactly how faraway nickel deposits and shipping corridors underpin the American way of life.

Before a toaster ever lands on a store shelf, its raw materials have traveled the world. The average toaster is a melting pot (literally, in some cases) of minerals and materials from multiple continents. The metal body and heating elements, the plastic knobs, the wires and insulation – each ingredient originates somewhere different. Imagine a toaster as a global scavenger hunt: iron mined in Australia, nickel from Indonesia, chromium from South Africa, copper from Chile, mica from India, and petroleum from Saudi Arabia. By the time you plug in your new toaster, it has already racked up more international mileage than most of us will in a lifetime.  To visualize this, let’s break down a typical toaster into its key materials and trace them to their countries of origin. The table below highlights a few major materials and where they often come from:

Plot this out on a world map, and it looks something like this:

If just one or two sources of these materials become disrupted—say, chromium from Kazakhstan stalls because of a regional conflict—you’d likely have a much more expensive toaster. If enough disruptions occur simultaneously, your local Walmart shelves might suddenly lack toasters altogether. Remember when a shortage of microchips in Taiwan during the pandemic crippled the American auto industry in 2021, leaving entire lots of unfinished Ford trucks idle? The complexity and specialization of global manufacturing today mean that even minor disruptions halfway across the globe quickly ripple back home.

This complexity isn’t limited to materials alone; assembling a simple appliance involves manufacturing facilities scattered across continents, each specializing in specific components. Here’s where your toaster parts typically come together:

By now, it’s clear how deeply globalized even the most mundane appliance is. Each of these components must then be transported to final assembly sites and onward to your local store. Ensuring this global ballet of ships, trucks, and trains moves unhindered relies on maintaining safe, open trade corridors—something historically rare and fragile. Freedom of navigation, the uninterrupted movement of goods across critical chokepoints, is a relatively modern luxury. In earlier centuries, empires of antiquity fought fiercely for control of strategic waterways and land passages, often blocking commerce entirely.

Today, it is largely American naval power and diplomatic influence that secures the openness of key global trade corridors, such as:

Maintaining secure trade flows through these corridors isn't a passive exercise. It involves continuous diplomatic engagement, military cooperation, and sometimes direct intervention. The U.S. Navy, for example, regularly conducts freedom-of-navigation operations through the Strait of Hormuz, directly countering threats from geopolitical tensions with Iran. American naval cooperation with allies in Southeast Asia ensures piracy and territorial disputes don't disrupt commerce in the Strait of Malacca. NATO alliances protect the Bosphorus Strait, ensuring stability in Europe's eastern maritime corridor. Farther west, American influence helps keep the Panama Canal open and accessible to global trade.

A shortage of toasters wouldn’t end the world—but if that's what it takes to make bread crispy, imagine the stakes for F-35 engines, heart monitors, or the natural gas heating your home. When the Gulf nations halted oil shipments to the United States in the 1970’s, daily life ground to a standstill. The supply chains enabling America’s economic prosperity and national security have only become more complex and interdependent since. The American way of life—comfortable, safe, and reliable—is underwritten by a world order secured through unprecedented strategic influence: Pax Americana.