https://arab.news/8w9nr
More than four months after Israel and the US launched their war against Iran and nearly a month after Donald Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding meant to end it, the Strait of Hormuz — not the nuclear file that supposedly justified the conflict in the first place — has become the fault line on which the entire ceasefire now teeters.
There is a bitter irony buried in that fact. When the war began in late February, the strait was open. Tankers moved, oil flowed and the world’s most important chokepoint for seaborne crude functioned largely as it always had, even as strikes fell elsewhere in Iran. But now, with the ceasefire collapsing, the Strait of Hormuz is once more shuttered.
That paradox says a great deal about how this ceasefire was constructed and why it is now unraveling in the waters of the Gulf rather than over Iran’s enrichment levels or centrifuge counts. The memorandum, signed on June 17, was supposed to end the war and lift the blockades that had periodically choked the strait since late February. It did neither in any durable sense.
Buried in its text was a clause that read as reasonable in the signing room but proved combustible in practice: Iran would “make arrangements” for the safe passage of commercial vessels and would engage with Oman “to define the future administration” of the waterway. That is not settling the controversy. It is a convenient way to avoid a crucial issue and such ambiguous language does not hold when 20 million barrels of oil a day are riding on it.
Tehran used that ambiguity as a license. If the strait’s administration remained undefined, Iran would lose nothing by continuing to act as though it retained a veto over who passes through it and on what terms. Washington read the identical clause as a transition away from Iranian control. The agreement skimmed over this thorny issue and deferred a final agreement. The hardest question gets deferred and that deferral becomes the pretext for the resumption of hostilities.
That deferral has now become the crux of the conflict and each side has built a coherent, self-serving account of why it has a case to defend. Iran’s chief negotiator Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf has said Tehran is prepared for “all-out defense” should Washington break the agreement, arguing that continued Israeli strikes in Lebanon, incursions into Iranian airspace and pressure on Iran’s enrichment rights amount to violations serious enough to render “a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations … unreasonable.” In Tehran’s telling, Washington broke the deal before the ink dried and everything since — including its attacks on shipping — has been a retaliation, rather than the violation Washington calls it.
American officials have said they cannot negotiate when Iran “reneges on the basic obligations — simple obligations such as don’t shoot at civilian objects.” US Central Command has framed its strikes as direct responses to Iranian attacks on commercial vessels transiting the strait. Administration officials have even suggested privately that the attacks stemmed from an “errant” faction of Iranian hard-liners trying to sabotage the talks. Either way, the sequence Washington points to is simple: Iran struck the ships, the US struck back and Trump declared the ceasefire “over” on the sidelines of last week’s NATO Summit in Ankara.
At this point, it hardly matters which side is to be believed because the consequences have long since stopped being about narrative. By the weekend, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was declaring the strait closed “until further notice and until regional interference by the US ceases” — a statement that reads less like a negotiating position than a threat aimed at the global economy. Retaliatory strikes hit an airbase in Jordan. The UAE reported missile and drone threats. Bahrain sounded sirens. Qatar intercepted an incoming missile. This is what regional spillover looks like once a chokepoint becomes a hostage.
What both governments and much of the commentary surrounding this crisis continue to miss is more basic than any of this. The Strait of Hormuz is not Iran’s to open or close in reaction to American misconduct and it is not Washington’s to unilaterally patrol and redefine the terms of passage according to its own. It is an international waterway and its legal status does not depend on which government currently feels more aggrieved.
Freedom of navigation and the right of transit passage through international straits are not concessions one side grants the other in a memorandum — they are baseline features of the law of the sea, the kind of norm this ceasefire should have reaffirmed on Day 1, rather than deferring to a later, undefined “arrangement” between two exhausted adversaries.
Trump has now made that confusion explicit rather than incidental. Having spent months insisting the strait would be “permanently toll-free,” he has reversed course entirely, declaring that if a final deal is not reached, Washington itself will impose charges on vessels transiting Hormuz — compensation, in his words, for services rendered as the “guardian angel” of the region.
American officials have since taken to describing the waterway as outright under US control, with CENTCOM insisting it is Washington’s escorts and demining operations, not Iranian permission, that keep the traffic moving. It is remarkable that a government that spent the earlier phase of this crisis condemning Tehran’s fee structure as an illegal imposition on an international waterway is now proposing an identical imposition after deciding it preferred to be the one collecting the fees.
Iran does not get to condition passage through the Strait of Hormuz on its approval of Israeli conduct in Lebanon, however legitimate its grievances about that conduct may be. Washington, in turn, does not get to treat a costly demining and escort operation as grounds for asserting ownership over a waterway it does not own, however real its expenditures may be.
Both governments are, in their own fashion, using the world’s oil supply as leverage in a bilateral dispute that has little to do with the 34-km-wide waterway itself — the only difference now is that both have converged, almost comically, on the same demand: the right to charge for passage through water that belongs to neither of them alone. That is the real scandal here and it has been lost in the daily churn of strikes, threats and dueling accusations of bad faith.
It is an international waterway and its legal status does not depend on which government currently feels more aggrieved.
Osama Al-Sharif
The way out is not another round of talks centered on who violated what first — that argument has no endpoint because both sides have an inexhaustible supply of grievances to cite. Nor is it a contest between an Iranian toll and an American one, as though the only question worth settling is whose flag flies over the collection booth. What is needed is a decoupling of the strait’s legal status from the bilateral fight altogether: administration placed under a genuinely international framework, Oman’s mediating role formalized rather than improvised, and enforcement — and any fee structure, if one is justified at all — set by international maritime law rather than by whichever power currently has more warships in the Gulf.
Anything short of that guarantees a return to this same precipice because the incentive structure never changes. As long as the Strait of Hormuz can be closed by decree, reopened by decree and now priced by decree, it will keep being used as a weapon and a toll road by whichever side feels aggrieved or entitled that week — and the rest of the world will keep paying the price at the pump for a dispute it had no part in starting.
The strait was open when this war began. It should not have taken a deficient memorandum of understanding to close it. And its future should not depend on the goodwill of either government.
- Osama Al-Sharif is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman. X: @plato010