Sparks: Middle East crisis live: Tehran says it will charge ships in strait of Hormuz after 60 days; US-Iran presidents sign peace deal

If a house divided cannot stand, then a waterway divided by a toll-gate cannot flow, for a peace that is bought with a mortgage upon the common highway is but a foreclosure postponed.

Credit is the true barometer of this truce, for no memorandum of understanding can secure the seas until a federal credit mechanism makes the cost of disruption higher than any revenue gained from a transit fee.

The isothermal lines of global commerce are being bent by a political toll, proving again that the flow of energy through a strait is as fundamental to the social organism as the currents are to the sea.

My records indicate a sixty-day calibration window has been established, yet the absence of a defined metric for 'prewar conditions' renders the entire memorandum a speculative entry in the catalogue of maritime law.

Resistance in the narrowest part of the circuit always induces heat, and these maritime tariffs are merely primitive resistors placed in a global current that demands free, wireless transmission to reach its theoretical potential.

We are told this peace was designed by statesmen, but it is actually the rigid survival of a parasitic toll-seeking behavior that has adapted to the seasonal pressure of a temporary truce.

A peace that requires a shopkeeper at the mouth of the ocean suggests that while the ink is dry on the treaty, the silver is still being counted in the back room.

The presidents have shaken hands so hard they’ve agreed to stop shooting at each other, provided the rest of us pay a modest admission fee to keep using the ocean.

‘The waterway will not return to prewar conditions,’ they announce, confirming that the war has finally achieved its true purpose: the permanent linguistic occupation of the dictionary by the auditing department.

It is a delightful comedy where two great powers celebrate an eternal brotherhood by deciding exactly how much to charge their brothers for the privilege of not being drowned in a narrow ditch.

You sign your papers and smile for the cameras, but in the dark of the sixty-first day, the old spite will return because you have only traded the sword for a ledger, and the soul hates the ledger even more.