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