Dubai Washington and Tehran announced an agreement this week to sign a ceasefire on Friday, an arrangement that is not yet a ceasefire but is close enough that the world has already begun forgetting the Strait of Hormuz exists.
The deal commits both sides to halt hostilities at a later, more convenient date, restoring in principle free passage to roughly a fifth of the planet's oil and returning the strait to the comfortable obscurity it enjoys whenever it is about to function as designed.
The announcement marks the fortieth time the President has declared peace in the region. The public, which disbelieved the first thirty-nine, has elected to believe this one, on the grounds that the law of averages must eventually apply to a man, and that keeping track had become exhausting.
Maritime insurers, who had spent the month quoting premiums normally reserved for active volcanoes, quietly revised their rates back down to the level of mild inconvenience. One underwriter explained that the strait exists, for pricing purposes, in two states, catastrophic and forgotten, with the bill arriving in the first and the apology in the second.
"This is a tremendous outcome for stability," said a senior official, gazing at a wall map on which the strait had, for weeks, been the only feature anyone could locate. "Within days, I expect to forget this place exists, and I look forward to it."
Analysts described the strait as either the most important place on Earth or a complete non-entity, with no setting in between. Asked whether the not-yet-ceasefire would hold, one diplomat said he was confident it would last precisely until Friday, when everyone would find out whether it had started.
Satyr Satire will confirm whether the ceasefire began on Friday, assuming we, and everyone else, remember to check.