There is a gate across the road to peace in the Middle East. A man with a clipboard and a microphone says, “I see no reason for it; let us remove it.” He does not ask who built it, or why, or what lay on the other side before it went up. He merely notes that the gate delays his arrival at the destination, and since he has never seen it serve any purpose in his own lifetime, he concludes it must be anachronistic - a relic of some forgotten superstition, perhaps, or a bureaucratic flourish. He does not consider that the gate may have been erected precisely because the road beyond it was not a road at all, but a cliff edge disguised by fog.

This is the modern habit of foreign policy: to assume that if a thing exists, and no one can immediately articulate its utility in the language of spreadsheets or press releases, then it is superfluous. So it is with the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow neck of the world through which a significant portion of the world’s oil flows - not because oil is sacred, but because civilization, like a man who has forgotten the taste of water, has come to believe he cannot live without its constant drip-feed. And so it is with NATO, that alliance not of treaties alone, but of trust, of memory, of shared griefs and unspoken assumptions - the kind of thing no treaty can encode, but which collapses the moment someone decides to count only the ink on the page.

The first mistake is to treat the Strait of Hormuz as a mere geographical fact, like a mountain pass or a bridge. It is not. It is a boundary, and boundaries are not built to keep people in - they are built to keep chaos out. Not chaos in the abstract, but chaos in the form of a single power deciding when and how to throttle the world’s supply of liquid energy. The gate is not the strait itself - the gate is the principle that no one man, no matter how rich or how armed, may hold the world hostage with a single lever. That principle was built after the last time a single nation tried to decide who breathed and who suffocated. It was built in the ashes of 1973, in the long lines at petrol stations, in the hollow fear of a winter without heat. The fence was built because men learned, the hard way, that markets do not weep when the lights go out - only people do.

And yet, some now say: let us tear it down. Let us pretend the crisis is not a crisis, but a negotiation - as if the world’s oil were a loaf of bread at a market stall, and the seller merely overcharging. But the seller is holding the knife. And the buyer is already holding his breath.

Then there is the NATO gate. The reformers say: this alliance was built for a war that no longer exists. The enemy has changed. The battlefield has moved. Therefore, the fence must be obsolete. But fences do not stand because they face the last storm - they stand because they were built to face storms, period. NATO was not built to fight Russia in 1949; it was built to prevent the world from forgetting that peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of trust. Trust is not a policy - it is a practice, like prayer or punctuation. You do not tear down punctuation because your sentence is now longer. You learn to use commas.

The clever man says: “Alliances are inefficient. They bind us to the whims of others.” But the ordinary man knows: a promise is not a contract - it is a covenant. And covenants are not kept when convenient. They are kept because the alternative - the moment you decide to break one - is that no one will believe you when you speak again. The world does not forget who broke the fence. It only wonders what crawled through the gap.

There is a third, subtler fence: the idea that peace can be scheduled. “Two or three weeks,” says the man with the clipboard - as if war were a plumbing problem, to be fixed by tightening a valve. But war is not a machine. It is a moral condition. You cannot solve it with a timer. You can only hope to contain it - to build a fence around it, not so it cannot happen, but so it cannot spread. And the first thing to go when you tear down the fence is not the war - it is the space in which peace might one day grow.

The reformers are not evil. They are merely the children of a world that has forgotten how to mourn. They see the gate, not the grave it guards. They see the delay, not the disaster it prevents. They have studied every map of the world and yet never looked at the map of human memory. They do not know that the most important things are often the things that were built to stop the things that seemed impossible - until they happened.

Before you tear down the fence, ask: what did we learn the hard way? The answer is not in the treaties. It is in the silence between the lines. It is in the fact that for nearly a century, the world has not burned - not because no one wanted it to, but because someone, somewhere, decided to keep the gate shut, even when no one could explain why.

And the gate remains.