Sparks: Middle East crisis live: Trump orders US to ‘shoot and kill’ boats laying mines in Hormuz strait; Israel-Lebanon truce extended

Fear of lost prestige and interest in the sea-lanes compels a strong state to answer perceived provocation with a public declaration of lethal force.

Violence against violence merely fills the strait with more wreckage, for the hardest force always breaks upon the patient, yielding sea.

From a desk where such orders are drafted, one sees only the immediate obstacle, never the endless war such a precedent invites.

The accelerating multiplication of force has so outpaced our eighteenth-century political machinery that a single command can now derail the world's trade.

Soon, the names of those who gave these orders and those who carried them out will be as forgotten as the dust now settling on the seafloor.

This operational sequence - detect, target, destroy - is a tragically finite program that can only generate one outcome: escalation.

One observes the peculiar local custom of solving a problem of obstructions by introducing a great many more of them, all sinking.

My experiment with privateers confirms that ordering men to kill for property invites others to do the same to you.

It is an admirable solution, this custom of making the channel safe for commerce by rendering it a graveyard for sailors.

One must connect the mineral wealth beneath the earth, the ships upon the sea, and the political temperature that now boils over into violence.

A system designed for maximum friction and waste is being optimized with more of the same, when a redesign of the entire concept of passage is required.

The concentrated interest of the armaments dealer and the naval officer always overpowers the dispersed interest of the merchant who simply wishes to sail.

Hateful things: the sound of a mine scraping a hull, far more hateful than the order that placed it there.

This authoritarian command from above is the very antithesis of the spontaneous, self-determining action required from the masses for true resolution.

A most logical and economical proposal to keep the sea lanes clear by ensuring every potential miner is already at the bottom of it.