What the world feared for months has flared up again. After attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz - among them a Qatari liquefied-gas tanker and a Saudi supertanker - the United States responded with force not seen in the region for a long time. In just two days, the US command CENTCOM announced it had hit first over 80, then another 90 Iranian military targets: air-defence systems, coastal radars, missile depots, drones and over 60 fast boats of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Iran did not stay silent. The Revolutionary Guard struck back, hitting US military bases in Kuwait and Bahrain - among them Arifjan, Ali Al Salem and Jufair. Tehran threatened to strike other US positions in the region if the attacks continued. Washington, in retaliation, reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil exports. In other words - both weapons and economy burst into flames at once.

The official story from the American side is that all of this is for "freedom of navigation" through the strait through which a significant part of the world's oil passes. Maybe. But when one superpower bombs the coastline of another state, and that one strikes back at neighbouring bases, "freedom of navigation" sounds like too clean a label for something that long ago grew into a direct military clash. The question no one asks out loud is - where is the line past which this is no longer called an incident, but a war?

For us in the Balkans, news like this isn't a distant spectacle. Every tightening in the Strait of Hormuz strikes right at the price of oil, and that - as anyone who fills a tank knows - reaches our pumps very fast. The big players measure missiles and bases; the ordinary person from Skopje to Belgrade ends up paying the bill at the petrol station. A war that looks distant has a habit of arriving through the price list.