By Aflatoon
I want to write about a zero.
On Saturday, five commodity vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz. On Sunday, according to the ship-tracking firm Kpler, the number was none. Not a reduced flow, not a slow day. Zero.
The weekend before, thirty-one went through. Before the war began at the end of February, the strait carried somewhere between a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred and forty vessels every day.
Pakistan imports around ninety per cent of its energy, and the great bulk of it comes through that water.
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I have been reading the coverage of this — ours included — and the zero appears, when it appears at all, in the eleventh paragraph of a markets story, after Brent, after West Texas Intermediate, after a quote from an analyst in Singapore about limited upside.
I understand why. Prices are what a markets desk reports, and the price barely moved: Brent unchanged at $88.55. If you were reading only the price, Monday was uneventful.
But the price is a lagging description of a physical fact, and the physical fact on Sunday was that the most important waterway in the world carried nothing at all.
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Consider what has to be true for that number to occur.
It is not a blockade in the naval sense; nobody announced a closure. It is that on Sunday, every shipowner, every charterer, every master with a cargo and an insurer decided independently that the risk was not worth the freight. The UAE says Iran attacked a third ADNOC vessel on Friday, having blamed it for two more on Thursday evening. Word travels quickly in that trade.
So the strait was not closed. It was abandoned — for a day, voluntarily, by the people who use it.
That is a more frightening mechanism than a blockade, because nobody has to decide it and nobody can be negotiated with to reverse it. It is the aggregate of a few hundred private judgements about insurance.
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Meanwhile the diplomacy proceeds in its own weather.
The American president spent the weekend urging Americans to accept slightly higher petrol prices, and said last week that he would “pretty soon” be declaring the strait a territory of the United States — a remark several US outlets read as a joke, and which has no basis in the law of the sea, under which a strait bordered by Iran and Oman is not available for annexation by anybody.
The Iranian foreign minister said Iran had not decided whether to resume talks.
Between those two positions sits a waterway that carried nothing on Sunday, and a country of two hundred and forty million that buys nine tenths of its energy through it.
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Here is what I keep coming back to.
We have spent this fortnight — and I include myself, at some length — writing about the Makkah agreement. What it means. Whether it is Article 5. Whether Egypt will join. Whether Trump’s blessing confirms it or contradicts it. Whether the text will ever be published.
All of that is real and some of it matters. But a defence pact is an instrument for a war you might have to fight. The strait is the thing that determines whether the lights stay on while you decide.
No clause in any treaty, published or unpublished, gets a tanker through Hormuz on a Sunday when its owner has concluded that the underwriters will not wear it.
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I do not have a remedy, and I distrust columnists who produce one at this point.
I would only say that we are a country whose entire energy position rests on a chokepoint we do not control, cannot influence militarily, and are currently mediating a war about. Our strategic response to that has been a bonded-storage policy inviting foreigners to keep their oil here, and a defence agreement with two countries on the far side of the same water.
Both may be sensible. Neither addresses the underlying fact, which is that ninety per cent is a number no serious state should tolerate for fifty years, and we have.
The zero will not repeat every day. Traffic will resume, the insurers will reprice, the tankers will sail. That is not reassurance. That is the problem — that it will pass, and we will stop looking at it, until the next day nothing passes.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
