On: The US and Iran are back at war. And due to one main sticking point, there’s no...

The reports arrive, and the shape of the thing is clear. It is not a new war, but an old one, resumed. The Strait of Hormuz - that narrow artery of the world’s lifeblood - is the prize. Both sides declare an impasse, as if this were a novel condition. An impasse is not a fact of geography; it is a failure of will disguised as a strategic reality. They speak of “no end in sight.” Of course there is no end in sight when the only end either side can conceive is the other’s abject surrender.

We have been here before. The configuration is different, the weapons more precise, but the story is the same: a contest for a chokepoint, where pride and necessity become indistinguishable, and the machinery of escalation acquires its own momentum. To call it a “sticking point” is to use the language of a minor contractual dispute. This is not a clause to be negotiated; it is a waterway that commands the economic fate of continents. The history of such places is written in blockades and brinksmanship, and it always ends in one of two ways: a costly peace, or a ruinous fight.

The analysis will be thorough. The maps will be studied, the tonnage calculated, the alliances weighed. What it will lack, I fear, is the naming of the true choice. We are not managing a crisis; we are choosing a shape for the next decade. Either we find a formula for shared suzerainty over those treacherous waters - a thing immensely difficult, but not impossible - or we commit to a grinding conflict where the only victory is survival. The present policy seems to be a hope that the other side will blink first. Hope is not a strategy; it is the resort of those who have run out of ideas.

I see the broad, sunlit uplands of stability receding again, obscured by the smoke of another preventable fire. The tragedy is not that we fight, but that we so often fight without first exhausting every avenue of a hard and realistic peace. That requires a courage different from the courage of the battlefield: the courage to face one’s own people and explain why absolute victory is a phantom, and why a secured channel is better than a closed one. No one seems to possess it. And so the impasse deepens, and the end remains out of sight, because we refuse to look at it.