Hormuz: Tehran negotiates with the strait, Trump answers with a cudgel

According to Le Monde, Tehran says it is ready to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within two days, on condition that Washington accepts its demands. The Islamic Republic is calling in particular for a regional ceasefire and the lifting of sanctions. For his part, Donald Trump threatens to "give it a cudgel blow", two days before the American midterm elections.

So much for the facts. The rest is our reading, and it comes down to one question: who profits from the crisis?

First, let us note what we do not know. The dispatch says nothing about the detail of the conditions, nor about the actual state of shipping in the strait, nor about the American response beyond the threat. Let us not fill these gaps with imagination. Let us instead look at the structure.

A strait through which a considerable share of the world's oil passes becomes a bargaining chip. Tehran has grasped this: under sanctions, strangled, it puts on the table the only card that can make markets tremble. Washington, for its part, wields the other weapon, financial and military: sanctions on one side, the cudgel on the other. Each side negotiates with what it has. This is less diplomacy than a power struggle with the cards face up.

The Gazette's concepts on imperialism are useful here. In monopoly capitalism, the great powers contest raw materials, routes and spheres of influence; sanctions, alliances and military deployments are the political envelope around them. Read this way, the "lifting of sanctions" is not a humanitarian gesture: it is the reopening of a market and of access to financial circuits. And the "regional ceasefire" is a demand for recognition of a sphere of influence.

On the American side, the calendar speaks. A threat issued two days before a domestic vote also serves domestic politics. Let us recall what Lenin said of the state: an instrument in the service of a class, which dresses its interests in grand phrases. Today we say "freedom of navigation" and "a rules-based order". Curiously, those rules are applied ever more harshly to the weakest. Shipowners, insurers, oil tankers and arms dealers, for their part, know how to count: every tension pushes up risk premiums and fills order books. We have no figures in the dispatch, but the logic of war profit does not need a dispatch.

This is not about idealising Tehran. The Iranian regime defends its own state and its own ruling class; holding a strait hostage also means holding hostage the economies that depend on it, and above all their workers and consumers. The peoples of the region, for their part, will pay the bill first, whether it takes the form of bombs, shortages or inflation.

What can be bet on: if a deal emerges, it will be presented as a victory for diplomacy. It will above all be a provisional sharing of room for manoeuvre between rival powers. And if it fails, it will not be for lack of "will for peace", but for lack of compatible interests. The next forty-eight hours will show which of the two sides most needs to bluff.