The French mission to the United Nations circulated its draft Security Council resolution on a Strait of Hormuz international monitoring mission on the Thursday before last; through Monday morning no second permanent or elected member has signed on as a co-sponsor, and the Council's June schedule contains no vote. [1] Day four of the draft's public life closes Monday morning the same way Day one closed Friday: with one author and no signatures. The Le Monde and AFP coverage that placed France's text inside the Council's queue continues to treat the absence of a second name as a matter of timing rather than as the structural artifact it has become — the same pattern the paper read on Day three.

The United States-Bahrain draft from May 5 remains adjacent and equally unmoved. Secretary of State Marco Rubio's announcement of the U.S. co-sponsorship has not produced a Council vote request from the U.S. mission in New York. Bahrain's Foreign Ministry — also one of the six Gulf capitals that have not acknowledged Trump's Saturday eight-capital call — has not requested a vote on the text it co-sponsored. Trump's Truth Social claim of a "largely negotiated" Iran framework is the third Hormuz authorship claim sitting in public, and it carries no Council footprint at all.

Three press releases. Four days. No votes. Russia and China — the two permanent members the paper has watched for a Hormuz veto since the April 7 joint block of the original U.S.-Bahrain text — produced no Monday statement on either draft. Beijing's silence across the entire weekend's Iran diplomacy is itself a data point, given China's standing as the largest single buyer of the Iranian crude any post-war Hormuz framework would re-route. A Council architecture in which no draft has a co-sponsor and no draft has a vote schedule four full days into the most consequential strait-of-Hormuz news week of the year is not deliberating. It is waiting for someone else to make the call.

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels