Tensions Persist in Strait of Hormuz After US Rejects Iran's Proposal

The takes

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  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  Shutting Hormuz Is Taxing the Poor Without a Vote

  By rejecting negotiation over the Strait of Hormuz and drifting toward explosions instead of bargains, statesmen are quietly taxing the world’s labourers through dearer energy and shattered confidence in trade.

  When a narrow channel carries much of the world’s crude oil, one need not be a philosopher to see that a cannon fired there resounds in every kitchen in the world. We are told that a proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was rejected, that mediators were at hand, and that, hours later, explosions were heard in the waterway. At the very moment when crude was being shepherded out of the Gulf in prodigious quantity, the chief artery was treated as a stage for gesture and reprisal. The drama is local and visible; the bill will be global and obscure. It will arrive not as a declaration of war, but as a higher fuel bill and a smaller pay packet.

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  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  Rejecting the Strait of Hormuz Deal Is Not Strength but Breach of Trust

  When a ruler spurns negotiation over a vital waterway and violence follows, he ceases to be a guardian of rights and begins to look like a man using power for his own will.

  I begin not in the Strait of Hormuz, but in the condition all men are born into. By nature, as I argued in the Second Treatise, they are free, equal, and independent, subject only to the law of reason, which forbids each to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. They quit this state, and submit to governors, only that their rights may be better secured. Political power is thus not a natural dominion of some over others, but a trust laid in their hands by those who might otherwise have gone on without it. Whoever exercises that power must answer, at every turn, whether he truly protects those lives, liberties, and estates, or hazards them.

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  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  Trump, Iran, and the Strait: When Half-War Meets Half-Peace

  By rejecting Iran’s offer and drifting into explosions at Hormuz, both sides show the same defect: a taste for the middle course that pays the price of war without securing the profit of victory.

  A narrow strait focuses the mind. In the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s oil passes through a corridor so tight that one good mine or one bad decision can choke it. There, we are told, Iran had put forward a diplomatic solution to reopen the waterway. The US president publicly rejected it. Iran’s foreign minister insisted on Tehran’s conditions and said they would wait for an official response through mediators like Pakistan, Qatar and Oman. Hours later, according to Iranian media, explosions were heard in the strait. This is enough for an anatomy of power, though not for a court verdict on who lit the fuse.

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