Three Claims on One Strait

In March, Donald Trump demanded the Strait of Hormuz be open, safe, and free; by August 12 he was telling reporters the United States owned it; two days later he promised to declare it American territory ^[1][2][3]. Five months, one waterway, and a drift from demanding free passage to claiming the ground itself. Iran's deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, answered the annexation talk with the line that has become the conflict's clearest statement of its own terms.

The Strait of Hormuz cannot be seized by a tweet, an aircraft carrier, an order, or an election speech. — Kazem Gharibabadi

The irony is that Iran is, at the same moment, trying to seize the strait through its own institutions. In May it launched the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a regulatory body to monitor and manage traffic ^[4]. Its parliament has passed a framework for securing the strait and the Persian Gulf, and its foreign minister says a legal mechanism with Oman for managing traffic is nearly done ^[5]. Khamenei has announced what he calls a new phase of management for the waterway ^[6]. Iran is not resisting the idea that the strait should be governed; it is racing to be the one that governs it. The United States is doing the same from the other direction. The territorial claim is the loud end of a posture that has been building for months: an open-ended naval blockade that Hegseth says can be maintained indefinitely ^[3], and a brief April proposal for a toll system on cargo transiting the strait ^[6]. The White House later said the president was joking about territory, but the claim is on the record and the blockade is real ^[3]. Then there is a third lane. On August 13, Saudi Arabia launched a 13-nation maritime defense alliance with Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, plus a joint defense agreement with Turkey and Pakistan that its backers describe as equivalent to NATO's Article 5 ^[7]. Regional powers are not waiting to see whether Washington or Tehran wins the argument over who owns the strait; they are building their own framework. Here is the pattern that holds the whole thing together: every one of these bids produces its counter-claim. When Trump proposed tolls in April, the UK organized a 40-country coalition to keep navigation free, and Starmer's position was blunt.

Our position is 'open' means open for safe navigation. — Keir Starmer

When Iran and Oman proposed transit tolls at the International Maritime Organization, Iran simultaneously urged the IMO to reject a rival UAE-led proposal as politically motivated ^[8]. When Trump asked European allies to send warships, Germany, France, and Greece refused ^[1]. When Gharibabadi warned that if Oman would not cooperate, Iran would implement its own plan alone, he was describing the same zero-sum logic from the other side ^[9]. The US position contradicts itself in ways that go beyond rhetoric. Twelve days before the annexation claim, Washington was negotiating a 60-day deal to reopen the strait and lift its own blockade; that deal expired the same day Trump promised to declare the strait American territory ^[10][11]. The vice president has said the top US goal is keeping gasoline cheap for Americans, which requires the waterway open and flowing, not annexed ^[12]. And the administration has spent months arguing against tolls and fees, with Rubio insisting no nation on Earth supports paying to transit the strait ^[9]. A country that wants free navigation, low gas prices, and no tolls is not the same country that claims to own the waterway. That self-contradiction is part of why no framework gains legitimacy: the world cannot tell which US position is the real one, so it treats none of them as binding. The result is that the pre-war status quo — a neutral international waterway governed by the transit-passage rules of the Law of the Sea — is being dismantled without anything legitimate to replace it. Tolls have been proposed, sovereignty claimed, alliances formed. Traffic through the strait has collapsed by roughly 90 percent ^[2]. Every actor agrees the old rules are gone. None of them can produce a new set of rules anyone else accepts.