Sparks: Middle East live: Iran announces closure of Strait of Hormuz after US attacks

That the common highway of nations, intended by nature for the reciprocal commerce of all mankind, should be obstructed by the pulse of a single chokepoint - this is an encroachment upon the law of nations which no free people can suffer.

The situation is described as a blockade, yet beneath the surface, the tension between the fluid necessity of the tide and the rigid iron of the gate creates a harmony that can only resolve through fire.

You strike at them from the clouds to preserve your order, and they respond by strangling the world's throat, proving that a man will gladly invite a global famine if it allows him to taste the spite of his own ruin.

The claim is that a gate has been closed, but when the conditions of the gate - the ships, the water, and the hunger of distant cities - are examined, the closure reveals itself as a temporary mask for an emptiness that cannot be owned.

While the men in high offices calculate the tonnage of intercepted oil, I observe that the mothers in the village markets are already watching the price of bread rise with every shuttered league of sea.

Block the narrow pass to force an engagement upon your own ground. By making the deep water a wall, the defender turns the enemy's necessity into a tether that pulls their fleet into the mouth of the fire.

To believe that a single narrow passage can dictate the fate of a world is to ignore the infinite suns whose light knows no earthly sovereign and no locked gate.

Across seventy thousand miles I have seen many ports, and while the judges in this strait claim the right of closure, the law of the sea has always belonged to the traveler and the wind, not the chain.

'Stability in the region remains our primary objective,' the spokesperson declared, precisely as the last artery of the world's commerce was severed by a knife they spent forty years sharpening.

Setting fire to one’s neighbor’s house is a traditional pastime, but locking the garden gate so the fire brigade cannot reach the hydrant is a touch of malice that would make even a Bolshevik blush.

In the capital they drink champagne and talk of grand strategy, while on the coast, a lonely sailor watches the horizon for a ship that will never arrive, wondering why his world has suddenly grown so quiet.

Record the names of the vessels turned back and the dates of the strikes, for when the inevitable famine arrives, the ledger will show it was not an act of God but a deliberate calculation of the powerful.

By appealing to the sacred rights of sovereignty while denying the basic right of movement to the world, these powers prove that their devotion to law is merely a mask for the exercise of the master's whip.

We could transmit the very energy these tankers carry through the atmosphere without the need for a single vulnerable ship, but we choose instead to fight over a narrow ditch in the sand.