Thank you for another excellent assessment. You've added aa level of dimension to the Strait of Hormuz issue. It is a complex, troubling issue with potentially severe repercussions, not only in the Straits of Hormuz, but on a global level. While politicians and the media prefer everything to have a yes/no answer, it is a welcomed change of pace to read an article that explores the intricacy of the challenge.
Trump called multilateralism a mosh pit. The Strait of Hormuz just revealed what it actually is: a philosophy of convenience, dressed as principle, enforced selectively, and abandoned the moment the bill arrives in yuan.
Thank you for the comment. I agree that the tolling changed the calculus of the war. International law would have likely permitted Iran to restrict movement for security reasons, but there is no legality to the toll.
The outrage surrounding Iran’s assertion of authority over the Strait of Hormuz reveals less about international law than about who has historically had the power to define it.
For decades, the US has treated virtually every major maritime chokepoint on earth as part of an informal American security architecture. The Strait of Hormuz is patrolled by the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, the Eastern Mediterranean, even the South China Sea are all routinely framed as matters of “global commerce” whenever Western strategic interests are involved. Yet when a regional power bordering one of the world’s most critical waterways attempts to assert regulatory or sovereign prerogatives, it is suddenly denounced as medieval piracy. Why is that?
The legal distinction between a “strait” and a “canal” is far less morally obvious than defenders of the current order suggest. The Suez Crisis itself emerged because Egypt asserted sovereign control over infrastructure Western powers believed should remain effectively internationalized. The Panama Canal handover similarly recognized that geography and sovereignty cannot be permanently severed simply because global trade benefits from passage.
So where is the coherent principle?
If Egypt can regulate transit through Suez (impose fees, security rules, inspections, political restrictions) why is Iran uniquely illegitimate for asserting authority over Hormuz? If Turkey exercises sovereign rights under the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits over the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, including wartime restrictions on military vessels, why must Hormuz be treated as some permanently de-sovereignized corridor existing outside regional political realities?
The answer, of course, is not legal consistency. It is power.
The modern maritime framework — particularly the expansive interpretation of “transit passage” under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea — evolved during the apex of American naval supremacy. It reflects the preferences of globally dominant maritime powers whose economic model depends on frictionless movement through oceans they overwhelmingly control militarily. “Freedom of navigation” sure sounds universal and neutral. In practice, it has often meant freedom for the strongest navy on earth to operate indefinitely along the coastlines of weaker states.
You also dismisses Iran’s position as uniquely dangerous because it could create “precedent.” But precedent already exists everywhere. The United States itself has repeatedly weaponized maritime access through sanctions enforcement, naval interdictions, insurance restrictions, SWIFT exclusion, secondary sanctions, and extraterritorial financial jurisdiction. Washington effectively reserves for itself the right to decide who may transact globally, in what currency, using which shipping networks, under what conditions. Iran’s actions can equally be interpreted as an attempt — however coercive — to reclaim bargaining leverage within a system already deeply coercive.
Even the historical analogy to the Danish Sound Dues undermines your argument. The Øresund tolls lasted four centuries not because they were “fake,” but because geography confers power. Maritime law has never existed independently of force realities. It merely becomes moralized after the dominant powers consolidate control.
And this is where the deeper philosophical issue emerges:
Why should waterways adjacent to weaker states become “international commons,” while waterways adjacent to stronger Western-aligned states remain recognized sovereign infrastructure?
Why is it legitimate for the United States to maintain a quasi-permanent military architecture thousands of miles from its shores to guarantee its preferred interpretation of navigation rights, but illegitimate for a regional state sitting directly on the chokepoint itself to contest that arrangement?
At minimum, these are not frivolous legal or historical questions.
The current order’s defenders often pretend their own framework emerged from neutral universal consent rather than naval supremacy institutionalized into law.
That is the real fiction at the center of the debate.
Ahmad, thank you so much for the comment. You raise important questions about power, hypocrisy, and how international law actually works in practice. A few thoughts:
1.) Montreux vs. Hormuz: The Montreux Convention was a multilateral treaty that balanced Turkey’s sovereignty with international navigation rights. It allows Turkey to restrict warships (especially in wartime) but explicitly protects commercial transit. Iran, by contrast, has unilaterally asserted control over a major international strait, including waters bordered by Oman, and demanded a toll. These are not equivalent.
2.) Suez comparison: The Suez Canal is an artificial waterway built and maintained by Egypt on its own sovereign territory. I would argue that Egypt has every right to charge tolls for it, just as California can toll its highways. This is fundamentally different from unilaterally taxing passage through a natural international strait that has served as a global commons for centuries. The legal distinction between man-made canals and natural straits is well-established and there is not a moral issue. Moreover, I would argue that when UNCLOS was signed in 1982, the US was not at its peak of naval supremacy. It was really the start of Regan's naval expansion, but not the peak.
On the 1956 Suez Crisis, the U.S. did pressure Britain and France to withdraw, effectively accepting Egypt’s right to nationalize the canal it had built on its own territory. But that precedent supports Egypt’s control over its artificial infrastructure, not Iran’s attempt to do the same with a natural geographic chokepoint.
3.) Power and the financial system: The United States (along with allies) built the modern financial architecture — SWIFT, deep capital markets, dollar liquidity, etc. — through decades of institutional work, innovation, and trust. Policing that system via sanctions is different in kind from parking missiles on a beach and extracting rent from the world’s oil trade.
I absolutely take your point that power has always shaped international law. But I would offer that normalizing Iran’s PGSA and accepting the toll wouldn’t expose Western hypocrisy so much as it would risk creating a precedent of weaponizing geographic chokepoints that have long been open for commerce. Thank you for reading and appreciate the discussion.
Thanks for the thoughtful response Jess. I think where we differ is not on the facts, but on the underlying assumptions.
The distinctions you draw between Hormuz, Suez, and Montreux are legal distinctions established by the current international order. My question is whether those distinctions are as self-evidently legitimate as we often assume.
Suez and Hormuz perform essentially the same economic function: they are strategic chokepoints through which global commerce flows. Egypt may charge tolls because sovereignty over the canal is recognized. Turkey enjoys special rights in the Bosphorus because geography confers unique strategic importance. The principle that geography creates sovereign prerogatives is therefore already embedded in international law. The real debate is where those prerogatives begin and end.
More fundamentally, I think we should distinguish between legitimacy and acceptance. The modern maritime framework emerged during an era dominated by Western naval powers whose overriding interest was maximizing freedom of navigation. That does not invalidate the framework, but neither does it make it morally neutral.
On the question of "weaponization," I would argue that you are applying this term selectively. A missile overlooking a strait is certainly a form of leverage. But so too are secondary sanctions, reserve seizures, SWIFT exclusions, financial blockades, and the ability to cut nations off from the global payments system. From the perspective of many countries outside the Western alliance, both are examples of strategic advantages being converted into political influence. The tools differ; the underlying logic is remarkably similar.
Finally, I would challenge the notion that Hormuz has functioned as a neutral global commons for centuries. Historically it has existed under successive hegemonic systems—Portuguese, British, American—each enforced by military power. The "commons" was not simply discovered; it was imposed and maintained by whichever power dominated the surrounding waters.
The more interesting question is not whether Iran is challenging the rules. It is whether the rules themselves are universal principles, or the product of a particular historical balance of power that we have come to mistake for universal law.
The Suez parallel only goes so far. Nasser nationalized a company and kept charging tolls inside the existing financial order; the PGSA wants fees in yuan, Bitcoin, or USDT, which is a bid to exit dollar settlement rather than just assert sovereignty. And Oman, the one GCC state actually on the strait, declined to join the coalition denouncing it, so the regional consensus is shakier than the five-state letter suggests.
"The West loves to negotiate with men in suits, but the men in suits don’t control the water. While foreign ministries sign agreements in Muscat, the entities that actually dictate the flow of global energy—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—answer only to the Supreme Leader and their own massive military-industrial complex. Controlling 74% of Iran’s economy, the IRGC has zero incentive to honor a civilian diplomatic pivot. Trump may have signed a deal, but he forgot to check who actually owns the keys to the chokepoint."
If it were US mountains overlooking the 20 mile wide chokepoint we would have already genocided whoever was there originally and declared it ours forever in the name of white Jesus
The Sound Dues sounds like a great Danish folk band name
Thank you for another excellent assessment. You've added aa level of dimension to the Strait of Hormuz issue. It is a complex, troubling issue with potentially severe repercussions, not only in the Straits of Hormuz, but on a global level. While politicians and the media prefer everything to have a yes/no answer, it is a welcomed change of pace to read an article that explores the intricacy of the challenge.
Thank you so much, TJ!
Trump called multilateralism a mosh pit. The Strait of Hormuz just revealed what it actually is: a philosophy of convenience, dressed as principle, enforced selectively, and abandoned the moment the bill arrives in yuan.
Thank you for the comment. I agree that the tolling changed the calculus of the war. International law would have likely permitted Iran to restrict movement for security reasons, but there is no legality to the toll.
The outrage surrounding Iran’s assertion of authority over the Strait of Hormuz reveals less about international law than about who has historically had the power to define it.
For decades, the US has treated virtually every major maritime chokepoint on earth as part of an informal American security architecture. The Strait of Hormuz is patrolled by the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, the Eastern Mediterranean, even the South China Sea are all routinely framed as matters of “global commerce” whenever Western strategic interests are involved. Yet when a regional power bordering one of the world’s most critical waterways attempts to assert regulatory or sovereign prerogatives, it is suddenly denounced as medieval piracy. Why is that?
The legal distinction between a “strait” and a “canal” is far less morally obvious than defenders of the current order suggest. The Suez Crisis itself emerged because Egypt asserted sovereign control over infrastructure Western powers believed should remain effectively internationalized. The Panama Canal handover similarly recognized that geography and sovereignty cannot be permanently severed simply because global trade benefits from passage.
So where is the coherent principle?
If Egypt can regulate transit through Suez (impose fees, security rules, inspections, political restrictions) why is Iran uniquely illegitimate for asserting authority over Hormuz? If Turkey exercises sovereign rights under the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits over the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, including wartime restrictions on military vessels, why must Hormuz be treated as some permanently de-sovereignized corridor existing outside regional political realities?
The answer, of course, is not legal consistency. It is power.
The modern maritime framework — particularly the expansive interpretation of “transit passage” under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea — evolved during the apex of American naval supremacy. It reflects the preferences of globally dominant maritime powers whose economic model depends on frictionless movement through oceans they overwhelmingly control militarily. “Freedom of navigation” sure sounds universal and neutral. In practice, it has often meant freedom for the strongest navy on earth to operate indefinitely along the coastlines of weaker states.
You also dismisses Iran’s position as uniquely dangerous because it could create “precedent.” But precedent already exists everywhere. The United States itself has repeatedly weaponized maritime access through sanctions enforcement, naval interdictions, insurance restrictions, SWIFT exclusion, secondary sanctions, and extraterritorial financial jurisdiction. Washington effectively reserves for itself the right to decide who may transact globally, in what currency, using which shipping networks, under what conditions. Iran’s actions can equally be interpreted as an attempt — however coercive — to reclaim bargaining leverage within a system already deeply coercive.
Even the historical analogy to the Danish Sound Dues undermines your argument. The Øresund tolls lasted four centuries not because they were “fake,” but because geography confers power. Maritime law has never existed independently of force realities. It merely becomes moralized after the dominant powers consolidate control.
And this is where the deeper philosophical issue emerges:
Why should waterways adjacent to weaker states become “international commons,” while waterways adjacent to stronger Western-aligned states remain recognized sovereign infrastructure?
Why is it legitimate for the United States to maintain a quasi-permanent military architecture thousands of miles from its shores to guarantee its preferred interpretation of navigation rights, but illegitimate for a regional state sitting directly on the chokepoint itself to contest that arrangement?
At minimum, these are not frivolous legal or historical questions.
The current order’s defenders often pretend their own framework emerged from neutral universal consent rather than naval supremacy institutionalized into law.
That is the real fiction at the center of the debate.
Ahmad, thank you so much for the comment. You raise important questions about power, hypocrisy, and how international law actually works in practice. A few thoughts:
1.) Montreux vs. Hormuz: The Montreux Convention was a multilateral treaty that balanced Turkey’s sovereignty with international navigation rights. It allows Turkey to restrict warships (especially in wartime) but explicitly protects commercial transit. Iran, by contrast, has unilaterally asserted control over a major international strait, including waters bordered by Oman, and demanded a toll. These are not equivalent.
2.) Suez comparison: The Suez Canal is an artificial waterway built and maintained by Egypt on its own sovereign territory. I would argue that Egypt has every right to charge tolls for it, just as California can toll its highways. This is fundamentally different from unilaterally taxing passage through a natural international strait that has served as a global commons for centuries. The legal distinction between man-made canals and natural straits is well-established and there is not a moral issue. Moreover, I would argue that when UNCLOS was signed in 1982, the US was not at its peak of naval supremacy. It was really the start of Regan's naval expansion, but not the peak.
On the 1956 Suez Crisis, the U.S. did pressure Britain and France to withdraw, effectively accepting Egypt’s right to nationalize the canal it had built on its own territory. But that precedent supports Egypt’s control over its artificial infrastructure, not Iran’s attempt to do the same with a natural geographic chokepoint.
3.) Power and the financial system: The United States (along with allies) built the modern financial architecture — SWIFT, deep capital markets, dollar liquidity, etc. — through decades of institutional work, innovation, and trust. Policing that system via sanctions is different in kind from parking missiles on a beach and extracting rent from the world’s oil trade.
I absolutely take your point that power has always shaped international law. But I would offer that normalizing Iran’s PGSA and accepting the toll wouldn’t expose Western hypocrisy so much as it would risk creating a precedent of weaponizing geographic chokepoints that have long been open for commerce. Thank you for reading and appreciate the discussion.
Thanks for the thoughtful response Jess. I think where we differ is not on the facts, but on the underlying assumptions.
The distinctions you draw between Hormuz, Suez, and Montreux are legal distinctions established by the current international order. My question is whether those distinctions are as self-evidently legitimate as we often assume.
Suez and Hormuz perform essentially the same economic function: they are strategic chokepoints through which global commerce flows. Egypt may charge tolls because sovereignty over the canal is recognized. Turkey enjoys special rights in the Bosphorus because geography confers unique strategic importance. The principle that geography creates sovereign prerogatives is therefore already embedded in international law. The real debate is where those prerogatives begin and end.
More fundamentally, I think we should distinguish between legitimacy and acceptance. The modern maritime framework emerged during an era dominated by Western naval powers whose overriding interest was maximizing freedom of navigation. That does not invalidate the framework, but neither does it make it morally neutral.
On the question of "weaponization," I would argue that you are applying this term selectively. A missile overlooking a strait is certainly a form of leverage. But so too are secondary sanctions, reserve seizures, SWIFT exclusions, financial blockades, and the ability to cut nations off from the global payments system. From the perspective of many countries outside the Western alliance, both are examples of strategic advantages being converted into political influence. The tools differ; the underlying logic is remarkably similar.
Finally, I would challenge the notion that Hormuz has functioned as a neutral global commons for centuries. Historically it has existed under successive hegemonic systems—Portuguese, British, American—each enforced by military power. The "commons" was not simply discovered; it was imposed and maintained by whichever power dominated the surrounding waters.
The more interesting question is not whether Iran is challenging the rules. It is whether the rules themselves are universal principles, or the product of a particular historical balance of power that we have come to mistake for universal law.
The Suez parallel only goes so far. Nasser nationalized a company and kept charging tolls inside the existing financial order; the PGSA wants fees in yuan, Bitcoin, or USDT, which is a bid to exit dollar settlement rather than just assert sovereignty. And Oman, the one GCC state actually on the strait, declined to join the coalition denouncing it, so the regional consensus is shakier than the five-state letter suggests.
If only a US Adminsitration hadn't fallen into this trap. Especially after bullying every ally that it had.
"The West loves to negotiate with men in suits, but the men in suits don’t control the water. While foreign ministries sign agreements in Muscat, the entities that actually dictate the flow of global energy—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—answer only to the Supreme Leader and their own massive military-industrial complex. Controlling 74% of Iran’s economy, the IRGC has zero incentive to honor a civilian diplomatic pivot. Trump may have signed a deal, but he forgot to check who actually owns the keys to the chokepoint."
https://triggledger.substack.com/p/the-art-of-the-farce-how-trumps-flawed?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=8gc1qf
https://triggledger.substack.com/p/the-art-of-the-farce-how-trumps-flawed?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=8gc1qf
If it were US mountains overlooking the 20 mile wide chokepoint we would have already genocided whoever was there originally and declared it ours forever in the name of white Jesus