### The manoeuvre nobody asked for
On 11 June, the United States Central Command announced that two of its warships had crossed through the Strait of Hormuz [17]. The Pentagon framed the transit as routine freedom-of-navigation operations. Yet nothing about the Strait has been routine since February, when Israel and the US launched airstrikes on Iran, prompting Tehran to close the waterway and plunge global energy markets into turmoil [1, 2, 8, 11]. Multiple outlets report that US military vessels have now made repeated passages through waters Iran claims to control [3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17]. What Washington presents as asserting international law, Tehran — and much of the Gulf — views as deliberate provocation.