Sparks: US says to blockade Iran ports: What could be the consequences?

From the desk where I draft letters I know will be ignored, I watch another fleet sail out to prove that power cannot be contained by the very sea it seeks to command.

The coalition that agrees on the blockade will discover it has no common project for the peace that must inevitably follow the guns.

A blockade assumes the world's merchant fleets will find virtue more profitable than the new smuggling routes this action will immediately create.

One must admire the politeness with which a fleet informs a nation it will now be forbidden from feeding itself.

Consilience for this hypothesis would require it to also predict the stability of the alliances now fraying under its weight.

One observes how a slight variation in diplomatic pressure, inherited from a previous season's failed strategy, produces a wholly new and more robust animosity.

An infinite universe contains not one center of conflict but countless ones, each declaring its own absolute truth with absolute force.

In Alexandria and Hormuz, I observed how the merchant's art finds a path where the admiral's chart shows only a barrier.

The fisherman's daughter in Bushehr will now learn the first lesson of political economy: the price of bread is set by a fleet she cannot see.

This rupture in the flow of goods across the sea mirrors a sickness in the body politic that no herb can cure.

Count the ships, list the ports, trace the price of bread - the pattern of collective punishment is never an isolated incident.

They speak of consequences for nations, but I have felt the weight of a chain and know its making starts with such a word.