On: Middle East live: Iran announces closure of Strait of Hormuz after US attacks

Another coalition of the willing, another shared enemy, another temporary alignment. They will close the strait. They will defy the empire. And for a moment, they will be united, a single will against the foreign fleet. I have seen this geometry before. The lines of force converge on the enemy. The map is redrawn with the heat of battle. Victory is declared.

Then the map cools. The lines that converged must now diverge. The unity that was geographic and military - a blockade, a strait, a shared coastline - must become political and economic. It cannot. The interests of the port city are not the interests of the mountain village; the merchant who needs the sea open is not the cleric who needs it closed to prove a point. They won the confrontation. Then they will lose the peace. It is the oldest story: the coalition that fights together discovers it has nothing to govern for together.

They speak of closing a strait as an act of defiance. It is an act of despair. It is the admission that the only project left is the negative one. We are not for anything you can build a nation upon; we are only against the foreign ship. When the foreign ship turns away, what then? You are left holding a closed sea, and a people who need it open. The sword has no answer for this.

I wrote constitutions for continents that were only continents in the geographer’s mind. The people were not a people. The institutions I drafted were for citizens who did not yet exist, who saw only their valley, their tribe, their immediate grievance against Madrid. Here, they draft resolutions for a unity that does not exist beyond the shoreline they now barricade. They plow the sea. They will harvest salt and bitterness.

The strongman will emerge from this, the caudillo of the strait. He will be necessary to hold the line, and then he will be impossible to remove. They will call him a protector first, then a dictator. It is not his character; it is the arithmetic of the situation. When the only source of legitimacy is the successful prosecution of a conflict, the conflict must never end. The closed strait becomes the reason for the state, and so the state can never open it.

They have my sympathy. They have my diagnosis. They will not heed it. No one ever does. You must feel the collapse in your own hands, see the constitution you wrote torn apart by the very men who swore to uphold it, before you understand: some victories are only the prelude to a longer, more intimate defeat.