The Strait of Hormuz is nearly empty. Fewer than 20 commodity vessels moved through it over the weekend, a shadow of the traffic that once carried a fifth of the world’s oil 3. The water is not the problem; the politics are. Washington prepares new sanctions, Tehran vows a harsh response, and the rial keeps sinking 1. The standoff is familiar, almost ritualized. But the emptiness of the strait is a useful image for how power actually operates in unstable states: not through declarations, but through the quiet, cumulative withdrawal of normal life.
Consider the two attacks that dominated the day’s news. In Kryvyi Rih, Russian drones hit a shopping centre in two waves, the second arriving roughly half an hour after the first, killing at least 16 people and wounding more than 130 4. The timing suggests a deliberate tactic: strike, wait for rescuers, strike again. In Krasnodar, Ukrainian drones hit Ozon warehouses, and Russian authorities report at least two child deaths 5. Both sides claim the moral high ground; both inflict the same arithmetic of civilian pain. This is not a paradox. It is the logic of attrition, where each side’s legitimacy depends on denying the other’s, and the cost is paid in places where people shop.
The pattern repeats across borders. In Gaza, Israeli strikes killed four people, including two children, despite a ceasefire in effect since October 2025, and just a week after a US delegation urged restraint 6. In the West Bank, settlers killed a Palestinian teenager, and at least 87 Palestinians have died in nearly 1,500 attacks this year 9. In Kenscoff, Haiti, a gang attack left 47 dead, 22 of them executed in a church, with the gang leader threatening to kill hostages if authorities respond 11. Each case has its own history, its own actors, its own grievances. But the structure is the same: power exercised through violence, justified by necessity, measured in bodies.
The question is whether anyone in authority can break the cycle. The evidence is not encouraging. CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a surprise visit to Moscow, the first by a CIA chief in nearly five years, but the Kremlin denied any meeting with Putin, framing it as routine intelligence contact 10. The visit may signal back-channel pragmatism, or it may be theatre. In Cuba, the state utility projects that up to 70% of the island will be without power during peak evening hours, a deficit of more than 2,000 megawatts 8. In Ceuta, police clear a makeshift migrant camp with tear gas, and hundreds return within hours 12. Even the release of Luis Manuel Aviles, the USS Lincoln sailor’s father, from immigration detention after 19 years in the US, is a reminder that state power can be humane—but only when someone with authority decides to look 7.
The royal return of Harry and Meghan to the UK, landing in Birmingham with their children after six years 2, seems almost frivolous next to these stories. But it is not. It is the other face of power: the soft, symbolic, media-managed version that coexists with the hard version of drones and checkpoints. Both are real. Both matter. The question is which one the reader should trust.
The myth is that power is rational, that leaders calculate, that institutions restrain. The reality is that power is often reactive, improvisational, and cruel. The strait is empty because no one wants to be the first to test the other’s resolve. The shopping centre is rubble because someone decided that a message was worth more than a life. The gap between myth and reality is where the dead are buried.
The consequence that matters most is not the next sanction or the next strike. It is the normalization of violence as a tool of statecraft. Once that is accepted, every escalation becomes defensible, and every ceasefire becomes a pause, not a peace. The reader should ask: which leaders are willing to be judged by the bodies their policies leave behind? The answer, today, is almost none.