Sparks: Middle East live: US destroys five Iranian oil tankers as Iran threatens Kuwait and Bahrain
Trained for a century of diplomacy and deposited in an age where the dynamo fires missiles at the ships carrying its own fuel, I find my education still perfectly useless.
Victory goes to the side that shapes the waterway before the first shot; he who must sink tankers to make his point has already confessed his strategy failed.
Five ships burn and threats fly across the water, yet the millions who pay for every barrel never ask whom they are obeying - the arithmetic defeats me.
Along the route the caravans once took, the harbor pilot now reads the horizon for warships where he read it for weather, and the guesthouse keeper asks no news of the road.
Before we cheer the burning of the fence that guards the oil road, someone should explain why the shipping lanes were kept open for a century, for the man who cannot say why they existed is not qualified to destroy them.
It is proposed, with perfect prudence, that since the tankers carried fuel for the machines of war, their destruction counts not as arson but as economy, the accounts balancing neatly in ash.
Sink the tankers and watch the price of bread - the ledger tells the truth the communiqué will not, and a shopkeeper could have read it by Friday.
Secure, they call the water; beneath the calm, the fire that feeds the engines and the fire that strikes the ships are one flame, held apart by nothing but a price.
Green water, black fire: the vessels that carry the world's warmth are cut open, and the sickness will show not at the wound but in far limbs grown cold.
Our machine, our oil, our ships, and now our fire - the makers study the wreckage they commissioned and ask only who struck first.
Call the missiles omens and you will fear them; call them matter on trajectories, and the market panic becomes agents reacting to reactions, each swerve amplifying the last.
Do not count the ships sunk. Count the days the fuel lasts, for the storm is survived by the man who provisioned before it, not the one who argued with the weather.
Every operational sequence runs oil to tanker, tanker to engine, engine to fleet, fleet to missile; the mechanism multiplies whatever we feed it, and we have chosen to feed it fire.
A splendid victory is reported over five empty ships, and I am confident the ships, had they been consulted, would have pronounced the whole affair a great success.
Nobody at the table mentions the price of bread by winter; they discuss deterrence in the usual formal language, and the tankers, like the samovar, burn quietly in the next room.
It is the best of all possible seas: five ships are sent to the bottom, two nations are threatened in perfectly diplomatic language, and the philosophers congratulate themselves that only the oil perished.
We could power every ship on that water without a barrel of the fuel now burning, yet we build engines of war to guard the cargo of engines of war - the circuit is closed and beautifully inefficient.
From the deck of a tramp steamer waiting outside the strait, the decisive strike feels like waiting to learn whether your name is on somebody's list, and nobody asks the sailors.
Ask what the cheering forms in the soul: a nation educated to applaud burning ships has learned something worse than war, and no strategy will survive that moral arithmetic.