When the world moves faster for oil than for lives

There is a peculiar moral inversion unfolding in the waters of the Persian Gulf. As oil tankers idle and insurance markets shudder, more than forty countries have mobilised with urgency and precision to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—a narrow maritime corridor through which roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil and gas flows. Yet, in the same breath, there is a deafening hesitancy—almost a studied silence—when it comes to halting the war that triggered the crisis in the first place. This contradic...