On: Bowen: Strait of Hormuz standoff raises risk of sliding back into all-out war

The news from the Strait of Hormuz has the air of a grim and predictable fairy tale, where the giants on either shore, in their determination to prove they are not afraid of each other, are quite prepared to set the whole sea on fire. They speak of pressure and of keeping it on, as if it were a scientific instrument and not a vulgar thumbscrew. I am put in mind of two men who, having built a rickety fence on a cliff’s edge to stop children from falling over, now spend their days leaning all their weight upon it to test its strength, and call this statesmanship.

The error is the modern one: to think that because a ceasefire is ‘fragile’ it is therefore contemptible, and that the strong thing is to show you can break it. But strength was in the making of it, however imperfect; its fragility was the whole point. It was a thread across the abyss. The wise man wonders why such a thread was spun at all, and by what weary compromise, before he decides to snap it to prove the quality of his scissors. This is not peace, they will say; it is merely not war. As if ‘merely not war’ were not a miracle worthy of all our vigilance and praise! They have forgotten the ordinary, extraordinary fact that for months, ships passed without burning. They have grown bored with the marvel.

Now they are determined to have a meaning, a policy, a pressure. And they will get, instead, a meaning they did not intend and a conflagration they will not control. The most radical thing in the world at this moment would be to defend that fragile, boring, diplomatic fence. For it was not built by fools, but by men who had just enough memory of the abyss to try, however clumsily, to rail it off.