Five days after France circulated its draft UN Security Council resolution authorizing an international mission to restore navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, no second member of the council has attached its name as a co-sponsor. The text, distributed in New York on May 22, names a French-led monitoring framework with European naval contributions [1]. As of Tuesday morning in Brussels and pre-noon in New York, the draft remains a French solo document. The United Kingdom, Germany's non-permanent partner Slovenia, and the rotating European seats have produced no statement of intent.

The paper's Monday account read the four-day absence of a co-sponsor as asymmetric to the European unanimity claimed in last week's Kallas-Macron-Merz-von der Leyen readouts on Russia's largest Kyiv attack in over a year. The Council of the EU's published agenda for the week shows no Foreign Affairs Council meeting tied to the "within days" language Kallas used Monday. The calendar is the artifact, and the calendar is empty.

The Iran-side momentum cuts the other way. Gulf News reported Monday that oil futures fell more than six percent on hopes for a U.S.-Iran deal and a Hormuz reopening that would moot a French monitoring mission entirely [2]. Iran's ambassador to France continues to speak of a bilateral Iran-Oman toll arrangement on the same waterway the French draft would internationalize. The diplomatic timetable is no longer Paris's to set. What Brussels wants to confirm is whether Berlin, Rome, Madrid, or London is prepared to put its name to a text that the markets are already pricing past.

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels