On: UN maritime body to begin evacuating sailors as Hormuz toll dispute continues

They have made a deal. A ceasefire. The guns are silent, for now, and the great machinery of the world is to be restarted. The UN will now begin the evacuation of sailors - eleven thousand souls - who have been stranded in that hot, metallic prison of the Gulf, while the lawyers and the diplomats bickered over the tolls and the tariffs, the price of passage.

It is a relief, of course. No man of conscience could wish for those sailors to remain in peril a moment longer than necessary. But let us not mistake the clearing of a symptom for the curing of the disease. The story here is not one of humanitarian rescue, commendable though it is. The story is that the Strait of Hormuz was allowed to become a choke-point for global commerce and a prison for men, held hostage not by pirates but by policy. The toll dispute was the spark; the tinder was the world’s pathological dependence on that narrow, sun-blasted channel.

We have been here before. The Dardanelles. The Suez. A single artery, clogged, and the whole body politic grows faint. The deal has been struck to move the ships. But what of the strategic lesson? We have bartered temporary access for permanent vulnerability. The evacuation is an administrative success. The continued existence of a crisis that requires such an evacuation is a monumental failure of statecraft.

They will call it manageable. “Manageable” is the word we use for a recurring nightmare when we lack the fortitude to wake up from it. Let them evacuate the sailors with all speed and honour. And then let them explain how we intend to ensure that eleven thousand men, and the fate of nations, are never again held to ransom in the same damned strait.