Both sides accuse the other of breaking the Hormuz ceasefire

Iran and the United States have accused each other of violating the ceasefire that was supposed to keep the Strait of Hormuz — the funnel through which a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil still tries to pass — from becoming a shooting gallery again. Tehran says American forces initiated strikes on an Iranian oil tanker. U.S. officials say Iranian units fired first. The water, as usual, has not issued a clarification.

The geography is older than the press releases. Hormuz is a choke point dressed as a shipping lane. Whoever can close it, or credibly threaten to, can tax the global price of everything that burns. That is why every “incident” in the strait is immediately translated into a claim of victimhood. The first audience is not the other navy. It is the insurance market.

A ceasefire that cannot keep a tanker unharmed is not a ceasefire. It is a pause with an alibi.

Since late February, when overlapping operations turned the wider theater into what one European diplomat called “a funnel of gunpowder,” commercial captains have been sailing with two radios: one for the weather, one for the war. A ceasefire that cannot keep a tanker unharmed is not a ceasefire. It is a pause with an alibi.

Energy desks in Houston and Singapore do not wait for a United Nations report. They wait for the next column of smoke. Households will meet the same news as a number on a pump. The strait remains what it has been for half a century: a narrow piece of water on which a wide country has bet its idea of order.