Sparks: Middle East crisis live: US targets Iranian boats amid tense push for control of strait of Hormuz

The assertion of control, even by force, reveals a deeper anxiety about the habits of obedience that truly govern these waters, far more than any written decree.

Men expand their empires and their machines, yet the essential facts of life, and death, remain unchanged by such busy desperation.

When governments speak of control and security, ask whose common sense benefits from such pronouncements, and whose lives are disregarded in the process.

The victory of arms is but a fleeting moment if the subsequent peace fails to establish new institutions that genuinely serve, rather than merely replace, the old masters.

Such concentrated efforts to control a narrow passage suggest a fundamental misapprehension of the true mechanisms by which nations prosper or decline, which reside in trade and industry, not in naval blockades.

To believe one can truly 'control' a strait, when the ocean itself reveals the infinite, restless motion of all things, is to cling to a small, terrestrial illusion.

These actions, cloaked in strategic necessity, reveal a troubling lack of moral restraint and a disregard for the human cost that such aggressive posturing inevitably brings.

One imagines the diplomats discussing maritime law over cucumber sandwiches while, just out of sight, the more primitive instincts of territoriality are given ample rein.

This outward aggression, the destruction of vessels, often masks an internal anxiety about vulnerability, a projection of one's own fears onto the perceived threat.

When nations create instruments of destruction and then unleash them, they rarely consider the suffering of the created, only the immediate satisfaction of their own intent.

Observation suggests that such displays of force rarely secure lasting peace, but instead provoke further costly experiments in retaliation.

Though these waters now see conflict, the merchants and sailors still find their ways, adapting their routes as they have for centuries, for trade demands its passage.

Such inefficient expenditure of energy, the destructive force of targeting, overlooks the true potential for a harmonized system of global interaction, one powered by unseen currents.