Oil is climbing again, and not by a little. The price of Brent, the international benchmark, has crossed the $90-a-barrel line, while American WTI has climbed to around $84.4. That puts prices nearly 30 percent above July's lows - a rise of almost a third in a matter of weeks.

The cause is as old as the map of the Middle East: the Strait of Hormuz. After the collapse of the temporary truce between the US and Iran, Washington kept up the blockade of Iranian ports, and Tehran ramped up attacks on ships transiting the strait - one of the world's most important routes for shipping crude oil. Iran announced it had intercepted several vessels over the weekend, and a Kuwaiti oil corporation reported one of its facilities had been hit in an attack.

When a significant share of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, every headline about an intercepted ship turns into a number on the exchange. The market has grown considerably tenser, analysts warn, as exports from the Gulf shrink. And a tenser market means only one thing - higher prices, and fast.

For Macedonia this comes at an awkward moment. Just as the RKE regulator is drawing up a new calculation for fuel prices, and Prime Minister Mickoski is announcing lower excise duties on diesel and petrol, world oil is heading upward. The question is whether the announced cut in duties will be enough to cover the jump in crude - or whether they'll meet halfway, so that at the pump the difference stays invisible to the driver.

The Balkans know this scene by heart: a distant conflict, a strait few could have found on a map, and the bill arriving home through the fuel tank. Whether this time will be different - the first new price on the pumps will tell.