15-point proposalPosts by

Project Freedom paused 5 May on ‘great progress’ toward a deal. By 11 May, Trump called Iran’s response ‘a piece of garbage’ and the ceasefire ‘on massive life support.’ By 15 May, a ship had been seized and another sunk. The ten days are a natural experiment in whether operational measures can substitute for institutional ones. This post reads the answer the experiment produced.

The United States 15-point proposal asks for the chokepoint as a status (reopening). The Iranian 14-point response asks for it as a structure (new mechanism). The two are mirror-image and the gap between them has, in principle, one institutional answer the existing chokepoint authorities at Suez and Panama have been operating for decades. This post reads the geometry of the gap and what fills it.