On: Escalating US-Iran strikes threaten interim peace agreement
June 28, 2026.
The news arrives, a familiar echo across the centuries. Strikes, counter-strikes, the fragile parchment of an interim peace agreement torn by the very hands that signed it. They speak of a “peace agreement,” these diplomats and strategists, as if peace were a thing to be signed into existence, a decree rather than the slow, arduous cultivation of a shared future. I remember the treaties, the grand pronouncements of unity and brotherhood that followed the expulsion of the Spaniard. We had won. The chains were broken. And then, the true war began - the war not against an external oppressor, but against the very nature of the liberated.
The coalition that fought together, united by the singular, burning desire to cast off the yoke, discovers its true, fractured self the moment the enemy recedes. The common purpose, once a mighty river, dissipates into a thousand warring streams, each seeking its own course, heedless of the grand ocean we once dreamed of. This “interim peace” they speak of, it was merely the pause between rounds, the moment when the disparate ambitions, held in check by a greater threat, are unleashed.
They strive to open the Strait of Hormuz, to govern it “without Iran’s direct oversight.” Ah, the delusion of control! As if a waterway, a vital artery of commerce and power, can be governed by decree when the hearts of men are not yet aligned. I wrote constitutions, beautiful documents, for nations that could not yet read them, let alone live by their principles. The blueprint was perfect, the materials - the people, the geography, the ingrained habits of centuries - were not. We plowed the sea, believing that sheer will could make the waves yield to our furrows. It was not betrayal that undid us, but the impossible conditions, the soil unprepared for the seed of true republic. And so, the strongman emerges, not from malice, but from the vacuum of legitimate authority, a necessary evil in a land unready for anything else. The sword remains, because the pen has no grip.