Britain and Europe are about to learn, yet again, that the bill for moral cowardice arrives not in the language of op‑eds and communiqués, but in the unpoetic dialect of fuel prices, blackouts and shuttered factories.

The Islamic Republic knows exactly what it is doing in and around the Strait of Hormuz and the other arterial chokepoints it can reach through its proxies. For forty years it has refined the art of “almost” closing the tap: harassing tankers, seeding mines, directing drones and missiles at shipping and infrastructure, threatening this lane today and that export terminal tomorrow. The aim is not to trigger a full‑scale war it would likely lose; it is to keep the world economy perpetually aware that a theocracy in Tehran has its fingers on the windpipe of global energy. This is strategy, not tantrum.

Washington and Jerusalem, whatever else one may say about them, chose to live in the real world. They behaved as if Iran’s threats were not a debating point but a structural fact. The Americans diversified supply, built up domestic production, hardened Gulf infrastructure, rehearsed maritime contingencies. Israel, with fewer natural resources but rather more experience of being targeted, treated Iranian escalation as inevitable and made its own provisions: intelligence, pre‑emptive strikes, alliances with regional actors who also prefer their oil and gas to flow.

Europe and Britain, by contrast, treated the same reality as a kind of atmospheric disturbance to be wished away by the incantation “de‑escalation.” They issued grave........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)