Five months into a war that began with coordinated American and Israeli strikes on Iran, a thirteen-night bombing campaign has gone quiet — not in victory, but in the fragile grammar of diplomacy. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil must pass, remains the fulcrum of the conflict: whoever controls its terms controls something essential to modern civilization. Both sides are under pressure — Iran from military devastation, America from the pump price of war — and yet the distance between their visions of order in that narrow waterway remains vast. History suggests that