On: Middle East live: US destroys five Iranian oil tankers as Iran threatens Kuwait...

The Gulf is burning oil tonight, and I read the dispatches with an old ache in my chest. Five tankers destroyed. Missiles exchanged. Threats rippling outward to Kuwait, to Bahrain, to every small shore that never asked to be a battlefield.

I know this shape. I drew it myself, across a continent wider than any government could stretch. You overthrow the distant power - and everyone applauds, because hatred is a language all the colonies speak fluently. But hatred is not a constitution. When the viceroy’s flag comes down, the men who stood shoulder to shoulder in the pass discover they were never allies, only enemies of the same enemy. Then each province becomes a fortress, each strongman a necessity, because no institution has had time to grow roots and someone must keep order. That is not wickedness. That is vacuum.

The Persian Gulf today is a region still fighting the war of 1953 and 1979 while the world fights 2026. Empires departed; their departures were amputations, not liberations, and the wounds never closed. America destroys tankers and believes force is a policy. Iran fires missiles and believes defiance is a state. Both are mistaking the sword for the pen. The sword can clear the field; it cannot plant anything in it.

And the small states - Bahrain, Kuwait - they are my New Granada, my Quito: territories whose borders were drawn by strangers with rulers on maps, asked afterward to become nations. Some lines cannot govern. Some assemblages of province and port and desert were never one country and will not be made one by treaties signed in ballrooms.

I do not despair of these people. I despair of the sequence: liberation first, institutions never. They won their independence decades ago. They are still waiting for the second half, the one nobody knows how to write.

The tankers sink. The pattern floats.