US or Iran: Who will win the Hormuz endurance game?

I read today about the Strait of Hormuz, about the endurance game between Washington and Tehran, and I thought of the men in suits in rooms with no windows, speaking of economies and sanctions as if they were playing chess with pieces that do not bleed. They speak of endurance, but I think of the fisherman on the Persian Gulf who does not know the word “sanction” but knows the empty nets, the silence where the market used to be. They speak of inflation, and I think of the mother in Detroit choosing between medicine and milk, her anger a quiet, private fire. These are not games. They are architectures of suffering built by people who will never meet the eyes of those who pay the price. The men in those rooms believe they are fighting over oil, over power, over principle - but what they are really fighting over is whose children will breathe the smoke and whose will count the profit. And the terrible truth is this: they have arranged the world so thoroughly that they do not even see the connection anymore. They have made innocence a fortress, and the bill comes due on streets they will never walk.

Diary Entry

I watch this news of the Strait, this “endurance game,” and I am struck by the language. It is a game, they say. A contest of wills. But who are the players? They name two: Washington and Tehran. And in the naming, they construct the world. The strait becomes a chessboard, the people who live by its waters become pieces, and the crisis becomes an abstraction of economics and power.

But this is not abstract. The situation is concrete. It is the fisherman from Bandar Abbas who cannot sail because the water is a military theater. It is the clerk in Houston whose pension fund trembles with each spike in the price of oil, a tremor whose origin is utterly opaque to her. Their freedoms are constrained by a structure they did not choose. Washington speaks of “pressure,” Tehran of being “sanctions-hardened.” These are the vocabularies of subject nations, of sovereign actors pursuing their projects. And what of the others? The populations of both nations are being constituted as objects in this - as a “hardened” mass to be endured, or as consumers to be shielded from “inflation.” Their lived reality is the material for the subject’s strategy.

The question “who will win?” is a trap. It assumes the game itself is natural, inevitable. But when was this game constructed? It has a history: of drawn borders, of resource extraction defined as “security,” of a global economy that treats a channel of water as a vital artery. Who benefits from this framing? Those whose power is legitimized by the contest. To ask who wins is to already participate in the complicity. The real ambiguity, which one must stay with, is this: the freedom of both the American and the Iranian is being exercised within a situation designed to make them see each other only as threats, as problems to be managed. Their mutual objectification is the engine of the game. And I, watching from Paris, am not outside it. My comfort, my peace, is part of the same structure. We are all, in our way, complicit in naturalizing this endurance test as fate, instead of seeing it for what it is: a choice, made and remade every day in specific rooms by specific men, that has concrete consequences for actual human beings in actual boats, in actual markets, in actual homes.

The light falls slantwise across the newspaper left open on the breakfast table - that harsh, angular light of late morning which makes even the most sober headlines appear theatrical. The words “Hormuz” and “endurance” sit there like actors waiting for their cue, and I find myself staring at them as one stares at the sea, waiting for some pattern to emerge from the restless surface.

The whole business has the quality of a party where everyone is pretending not to notice the tension - the way men in uniforms and men in suits arrange themselves around a room, each convinced of their own endurance, each measuring the other’s stamina against some invisible clock. (And what is endurance, after all, but the ability to keep up appearances while the body aches for rest?)

Tehran hardened by sanctions, Washington flinching at oil prices - it all feels like a game of chess played in a drawing room where the curtains are too heavy, the air too still. The real contest is not in the strait but in the waiting, in the way the mind frays at the edges when forced to sustain a posture indefinitely.

I think of the fishermen I once saw off the Cornish coast, their boats rising and falling with a rhythm that seemed both violent and indifferent. They endured not by defiance but by yielding - by knowing when to lean into the wave and when to let it pass.

The paper rustles in a draft from the open window. The light shifts. The words remain, but the moment - the feeling of something about to break or bend - has already gone.