Closed for business

Iran has announced that the strait of Hormuz is once again shut, with few ships getting through. The risk is that stop-and-go diplomacy gets less and less effective the longer this goes on.

It is now mid-July, four and a half months after the US and Israel first launched airstrikes on Iran. Despite all of the stop-start, negotiations, and presumably very expensive bottled water consumed in Geneva between then and now, the strait of Hormuz is once again shut. After launching a series of attacks on the Gulf states, amidst a series of escalat…