Hormuz: Washington strikes, negotiates, and calls it diplomacy

The facts first. According to Al Jazeera, Iran considers the American response to its plan on the Strait of Hormuz "not convincing". Indirect talks continue. At the same time, Donald Trump has confirmed that the US military struck an Iranian anti-aircraft installation on Tuesday. The file says nothing more: neither the detail of the Iranian plan, nor the content of the American response, nor any casualties. We will not invent them.

Then the awkward question: who benefits from the scene? What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Negotiating with one hand, bombing with the other. That is not a contradiction, it is a method. The strike serves as a bargaining chip. It tells Tehran that the price of refusal will be measured in missiles. Diplomatic language, meanwhile, speaks of "de-escalation" and "stability". Translation: who controls the passage, and under what rules?

Because Hormuz is not a geography, it is a tap. A strait through which a considerable share of the world's oil transits, and which every power would like to see open on its own terms and closed to everyone else's. In the Leninist grid, it is a textbook case. Finance capital, banks, oil majors, maritime insurers, energy-backed funds, seeks secure outlets and raw materials. The state becomes its attorney. Sanctions, alliances, arms contracts, fleets: the political shell of an economic rivalry.

We will be told that Washington is defending "freedom of navigation". Fine phrase. It looks very much like the defence of the interests of a bloc of capital. Lenin already mocked those who dressed up the predatory interests of "their" bourgeoisie in grand words like the defence of the fatherland (our translation, The State and Revolution). Today, we say "rules-based order". The rules, curiously, apply mostly to others.

Tehran is not, for all that, a blind spot for criticism. A state that brandishes control of a strait as a bargaining lever also defends the interests of its own ruling class, not those of Iranian workers. Two state apparatuses are squabbling over a chokepoint. The peoples pick up the bill: energy prices, military budgets, the risk of war.

And the arms dealers? Every strike, every counter-measure, every "proportionate response" fills order books. Cui bono? Not the crews, not the workers, not the passers-by in a Gulf port.

What we do not yet know: the real reach of the strike, the substance of the proposals exchanged, the position of the other riparian or importing powers. That is what will need watching. For the indirect diplomacy here looks above all like an armed haggle between managers of the oil route.