Tankers are biding time for now around the 33-kilometer chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz, which has been the world economy's hostage since late February.

There's a kind of diplomatic theater that everyone in the room knows is theater, but nobody says it's good to put on because if they did they wouldn't do it, they'd just concede that there is no end to the play. That was that kind of theater, the ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran that was signed in Islamabad on the 8th of April and more times than anybody cared to count announced as "full and complete" as they shook hands. It burst open again on Thursday morning and it was only those who wanted to be surprised who were surprised.

In the middle of the night, American troops attacked a ground-control station on the outskirts of the city's airport, Bandar Abbas, where Iran rests on America's shoulder along the strait. As usual, the official, whose name will not be disclosed, portrayed it as a matter of self-defense—Iran was readying a fifth one-way attack drone, four of which had been brought down, and the launch pad posed a risk to both troops and commercial sailing vessels. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded hours later, about 4:50 a.m. local time, firing at the American air base it accused of having launched the strike. Kuwait, where the U.S. has a big footprint, reported that its air defenses have been activated to shoot down hostile missiles and drones. A ballistic missile was shot down in Kuwaiti territory. Both sides said there were no casualties. This time.

It was the most grave encounter since the truce started, by the bleak score-keeping of this war. One that follows a pattern that has now become ritual: Iranian boats fire warning shots at American vessels attempting to slip through the strait, the aircraft respond and the Guard responds, and everyone maintains restraint and the markets proceed to do the only honest act in the entire affair: they move.

The chokepoint that any agreement cannot cancel

Let's clear the smoke and the truth is geography. About one-fifth of the world's traded oil flows through a waterway as narrow as, at its narrowest, a commute to work. On its northern bank is Iran. There is no document of understanding that can renegotiate that and it is the one thing the official positivity continues to try to shove under.

This is the attitude that should be heard more often than it is. From that first week, the men who operate shipping desks and risk-insurance books knew that whatever a peace deal might say on paper, the reality of the strait will remain in Tehran's hands for the duration Tehran has shore batteries, fast boats and drones, that is. In other words, according to a former senior U.S. energy envoy, it doesn't matter what the deal says, the Iranians will run the show at Hormuz for the foreseeable future and "everybody in the region knows that. That's a lot of transparency. It's a switch that can be “open, free and clear,” as the president put it, in the diplomatic jargon favored today. The more uncomfortable reality: It's a valve that Iran's hand never removes from, and any architecture that suggests otherwise is resting on sand.

Thus the obvious follow-up question will the ceasefire be honored? is really the wrong one. The ceasefire was never a peace. A respite won at a temporary reopening of the strait, which Tehran "with due consideration of technical limitations" opened and closed at will. All skirmishes since have been a different form of renegotiation of that leverage.

A graph that conveys the information of a war better than any speech.

To get a real feel for the conflict's real tempo, keep an eye on the price of Brent crude, not the press conferences. For the barrel, is has been like a real-time referendum on each threat, deadline and feint since the fighting started in late February.

It's an almost embarrassing easy-to-read pattern. Brent jumped past $113, its highest level in years, when the U.S. gave its 48-hour ultimatum in late March. Within a single session, it dropped over 10% after the president ordered a five-day break. In April, when the Islamabad truce went into effect, it fell below $100, losing nearly sixteen percent, as stranded tankers began trickling back through the strait, hundreds of them, comprised of over 400 crude carriers and a host of gas vessels. On Thursday, following this latest flurry of trading, both prices went higher, with Brent jumping approximately two percent to $96 and West Texas Intermediate moving to approximately $91. The market is not mixed up. It's just that it's not yet seen the boat through the strait before holding true to the headline.

The price is no longer based solely on barrel.

The oil-price saga has turned into a broader one. They've been dubbed by the Gulf states as the worst global energy crisis in decades, and they aren't pulling out any punches. The disruption has directly entered the American inflation calculation, sending it to its highest level in years, which has central banks on both sides of the Atlantic redrawing. At one of the major Wall Street banks, analysts have cautioned that the recent crude price run-up is spilling over into price pressures in general via second-round effects when high oil prices are no longer a line item but are instead a factor in the cost of everything that needs to be moved, made or shipped. That's how a dispute over a strait off the Iranian coast ends up, sooner or later, in some Ohio grocery bill or some Mumbai fuel surcharge.

The geographical range of damages continues to expand. Hormuz is not the only green line. A cease-fire agreement brokered at the end of March in Lebanon has barely succeeded in bringing a halt to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which thrust itself into the war. Israel's prime minister pledged to "snuff it out"; the army chief warned of steps to "intensify operations" in the south; residents in southern Lebanon have been evacuated toward Tyre in new evacuations while strikes have targeted what the army calls Hezbollah infrastructure. For its part, Tehran says that any final agreement has to include Lebanon as well — that is, the negotiators in Doha are not negotiating to end one war, but are attempting to tie several wars together in one agreement, and these wars are still ongoing.

The words of the chatter and the words of the chatter that are not said.

But behind the scenes, the diplomatic apparatus has not halted. Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Foreign Minister and the head of the central bank have been in Doha since to come up with a memorandum of understanding. The framework is said to be largely drafted. The snags are the obvious ones the exact wording of Iran's nuclear program, future of sanctions, reparations, and the language on the strait itself. A deal to reopen Hormuz was "largely negotiated" and will be announced soon, the president said over the weekend. Days later he was denying he was even close to making any compromise. Both statements can be titled the same: pressure.

The Gulf capitals are not in unison. The UAE has been the loudest critic, demanding the unconditional reopening of the strait, reparations from Iran, and even some caps on Tehran's missiles and its proxies, with the UAE's envoy in Washington saying that a simple ceasefire is not sufficient. The region's traditional mediators Oman and Qatar have remained silent. It is not a single block that's presenting Iran with one bill. It's a group of states with grievances that overlap, but also vary, and that's exactly the kind of rift a Tehran negotiator can exploit.

The not-so-comfortable read on the intelligence and analyst chatter in the past 24 hours. The way the swapping is done carefully orchestrated, with no one held hostage, with casualties kept to a minimum is rather like the way two governments conduct a controlled burn than a ceasefire that accidentally falls apart. In the previous cycles of this same conflict, Iran has warned prior to an attack on American positions in order to appease domestic calls for revenge while preventing a response that neither side can sustain. The interceptions Thursday (over Kuwait) fit that pattern, too, because there are no dead Americans. Both sides seem to desire more the prospect of war than the actuality of war.

The fleece in the hope Which returns the discussion to the starting point. The threat with this fight isn't that somebody will rip up the ceasefire in a frenzy. The risk is the complacent bureaucratic certainty that a slip of paper can do what only a balance of power between two sides can do: ensure a waterway that can always be shut down by one side.

This is now factored into the price of the markets, which no longer run up on the news, and only hit a low when a ship is actually hit. It is advisable for policymakers to do the same. A powerful, lasting solution, if any is possible, will not be found in the term "open, free and clear" in the strait. If it is to come, it will come from arrangements that are based on the assumption that Iran's hand stays on the valve, and verification, monitoring and consequence will be built around that assumption, not wished away. This is exactly what Oman has been reportedly floating: a “protocol” to monitor traffic through the strait, and it's also the most modest idea on the table.

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n the meantime, the most conservative prediction remains the negative one. More strikes will occur, more retaliations, more interceptions, more declarations of restraint. The barrel will jump, stop and jump again. The negotiators will continue to meet in Doha, the framework will remain "largely negotiated" and somewhere a tanker captain will be watching the Iranian coast slip past his port rail and wonder, as he has for three months now, will today be the day the warning shots come?

In other words, the play will continue. All participants are aware that it is theatre. They continue to act because there's no curtain to go down.