Trump said it with a grin, at a rally at the police academy in Nassau on Long Island. "After we finish with the defeat of Iran, which is suffering a heavy defeat, I will soon declare the Strait of Hormuz territory of the United States." Laughter in the hall. But what was a joke to an American audience is an entirely different sentence to half the world.

Two days earlier, on his own network, the same man wrote something that no longer sounded like a gag: "The USA has complete control over the Strait of Hormuz. I THINK WE SHOULD KEEP IT!" He gave the naval blockade a brand name - "Steel Wall". And added that Iran can do nothing about it there.

A chokepoint for the world's oil, not a patch of land

The Strait of Hormuz is not an island somebody can declare their own. It is a maritime passage carrying around one fifth of the world's oil - the tightest chokepoint in global energy, between Iran and Oman. Reports say traffic through it has been almost entirely halted in recent days. When that throat tightens, the price of crude does not wait for anybody's permission.

That is exactly what makes the "joke" more interesting than itself. Not the tone, but the logic it exposes: if you hold the blockade, you hold the territory. If you hold the territory, you do not have to negotiate - you simply declare. International maritime law, freedom of navigation, treaties signed over decades - all of it, in that one sentence, is reduced to a detail you can skip past with a smile.

The Balkans know this scene by heart

A statement thrown out as a joke, then an official announcement, then a fact on the ground. That is a sequence this region recognises without translation. First "nobody means it seriously", then "a technical question", then a map with something already redrawn on it. When the big players deliver that sentence with a grin, is anybody still counting borders at all?

Nowhere in those statements is there any explanation of what "territory" would mean legally, or who would administer the passage, or how long the blockade would last. There is only one position: control is ours and we are keeping it. The rest gets defined later - which usually means it will be defined by whoever is already sitting there with warships.

And if every fifth barrel of oil on the planet really does pass through that strait, then the question is not whether Trump was joking. The question is who will be in the room when it stops being a joke.