From Hormuz to Beirut : between the price of a liter and the price of tears

For a few weeks now, one name has been coming up on a loop in the French media: the Strait of Hormuz. Thirty-four kilometers wide between Iran and Oman, a geographic chokepoint most French people were incapable of locating on a map just two months ago, and that today dictates what they’ll pay at the pump on the weekend. Diesel at €2.30 a liter, a record. SP95 gasoline nudging €2. In five weeks, diesel rose 52 cents a liter, shattering the previous record of March 2022.

There, summed up in all its brutality, is the geopolitical lesson no one wanted to learn: Europe, and France in particular, is the willing hostage of a maritime route it doesn’t control, in a conflict it didn’t start, for interests it defends half-heartedly.

Vassalage laid bare

The figures have to be laid out, because they’re eloquent. More than 20 million barrels crossed the strait daily in 2024, the equivalent of a fifth of global consumption of liquid petroleum products. France imports 51% of the diesel it consumes, of which 29% comes directly from the Middle East. In other words, nearly one liter of diesel in three in our trucks, our tractors, our cars comes from that part of the world. When the strait closes, France coughs.

It isn’t a surprise, it’s a constant that we collectively refuse to address. The same hostage mechanics that Beijing exploits with rare earths, Tehran now exercises with a strait: taking a structurally dependent economy hostage is the favorite tactic of those who know their adversaries never bothered to secure their supplies.

France’s response to this structural dependence? Emmanuel Macron mobilized 19 of the 23 main surface ships of the French Navy, including the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and three amphibious helicopter carriers, in a “defensive” coalition whose stated objective is the gradual reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Impressive on paper. But what exactly are we protecting? Our oil supply. Our economic model founded on dependence on hydrocarbons. Our inability, in fifty years, to have structurally reduced this energy servitude.

It isn’t a foreign policy. It’s a short-term survival policy disguised as a sovereign posture, a posture Washington learned to decode long ago, and that it tolerates as long as it’s useful to it.

And meanwhile, since the fragile ceasefire in Iran that took effect on April 8, fuel prices in France have dropped only one cent on average. One cent. For that, we sent the Charles de Gaulle.

Oil passes through Hormuz. The war, though, is in Beirut.

It would be too easy to confine this conflict to its energy dimension. It would even be a convenient way of not looking at what lies behind it. Because the Strait of Hormuz isn’t the origin of the problem: it’s its economic symptom. The mechanics are brutally simple: the United States and Israel strike Iran, Iran closes its maritime chokehold, the world pays at the pump. But the heart of the war beats in Beirut.

Since the start of the conflict on February 28, Israel has opened a front in Lebanon by targeting Hezbollah, Iran’s armed wing on Lebanese soil. These two theaters (Hormuz and Lebanon) aren’t two parallel wars: they’re two faces of the same regional blaze. The closing of the strait is Iran’s economic weapon. The bombings of Lebanon are Israel’s response to the weakening of its proxy chain. One can’t be understood without the other. And the price at the pump you pay this weekend is, in a way, directly connected to the ruins of Dahieh.

Lebanon, moreover, isn’t a new case: it’s the most documented example of what the impossibility of building a State around a common identity produces over time. The war it’s enduring today isn’t an accident of history, it’s the culmination of a constitutive fragility no one ever really wanted to resolve.

According to the latest official toll, 2,454 people have been killed in Lebanon in six weeks of war, and more than 50,000 homes destroyed or damaged. Figures. Behind these figures, there are houses, families, summer memories. Hers, and I say “hers” thinking of someone specific.

It isn’t just the price of a liter

I’d like to talk about something else. About something the economic columns don’t capture, that the dashboards of the oil markets ignore, and that the speeches from the Élysée render perfectly invisible.

I want to talk about Manon Debs. You may know her by her stage name, Vernis Rouge, the French-Lebanese artist many discovered on The Voice season 13, at 25, reworking “Bande organisée” on the piano with a gentleness that stunned the coaches, and whose performance racked up nearly 20 million views. Born in Beirut, evacuated to France in 2006 because of the war between Hezbollah and Israel, she returns to Lebanon almost every summer to see her family on her father’s side.

This time, there’s no summer to wait for. The war is already here.

Vernis Rouge has just released a song, “On ne reviendrait plus jamais”. Not to chase buzz, not to “capitalize” on the news as the marketing professionals would say. She wrote it because she’s afraid for those she loves, because she’s far away and powerless, because writing is the only way she knows to feel useful in the face of the unacceptable. It’s the very definition of art at its most necessary: to give form to what overflows.

Two Frances at the same moment

What’s striking, in this several-week sequence, is the coexistence of two gazes utterly foreign to each other.

There’s the France that opens the app on their phone to find the cheapest gas station 800 meters from home. The one that calculates how much the next fill-up will cost. The one waiting for the hypothetical ten-cent drop promised by the experts. It’s a concrete, legitimate reality, and I’m not mocking it. But that France is deluding itself if it thinks it’s done with Hormuz the moment prices come back down by a cent. The bill isn’t done landing: food prices will follow in three to six months, driven by the disruption of fertilizer exports from the Gulf; summer plane tickets will cost between 20% and 40% more than in 2025; and the industrial supply chain will absorb extra costs that will ripple far beyond the gas pump. That France will pay for this conflict for a long time, in small invisible installments, without ever putting a face to it.

And then there’s the other France. The one that pays in full, and differently. The France of the diasporas. The France of the Manon Debs who have two countries, two families, two possible simultaneous bereavements. The one that doesn’t need a map to locate Beirut, because Beirut is the smell of grandmother’s coffee, it’s the voice of a brother on the phone saying “I’m okay, don’t worry”. That France doesn’t watch the price of Brent. It watches the news hoping not to recognize a street it knows.

These two Frances coexist at this very moment, on the same territory, with the same conflict as their origin. They don’t speak to each other. The first doesn’t have the tools to understand the second. The second knows very well what the first is going through, because it had to learn it on arrival.

What the song says that geopolitics can’t

I don’t know wars. I know economic analyses, and the price of a liter of fuel like everyone else. What I do know how to do is recognize when someone says something true.

Vernis Rouge wrote a song to feel useful. It’s exactly what art does when politics fails to make meaning: it fills the void between the statistic and the human face. The Strait of Hormuz is a geographic abstraction. Lebanon at war is a geopolitical abstraction. Manon Debs afraid for her family isn’t an abstraction. It’s a reality that 20 million barrels a day can’t tell.

France sends its aircraft carrier. Vernis Rouge writes a song. I don’t know which of the two actions will change anything. But I know which one deserves to be truly listened to.