Iranian Foreign Minister says countries like France should stop preaching to the world about human rights and international law, calls it blatant and shameful hypocrisy

The channel that matters for the tagged instruments is whether such language signals escalation or negotiation: oil premia have historically built on physical or military steps affecting Gulf supply, shipping and insurance, and faded on verbal exchanges alone, while any dollar bid has run through general risk aversion rather than the rhetoric itself. The distinction worth drawing is between statements that accompany action, strikes, tanker seizures, nuclear programme moves, and statements that substitute for it; the former reprice crude, the latter rarely do. The tells are follow-through in the form of military deployments, shipping advisories in the Strait of Hormuz, or a hardening of the European diplomatic position, and whether scheduled contacts between Tehran and Western capitals survive the exchange. As it stands this is positioning language, of a piece with past episodes where both sides kept the confrontation rhetorical while channels stayed open.