A Regional Agreement for the Strait of Hormuz: The World Can No Longer Afford to Wait

The 2026 crisis proves the Strait of Hormuz needs a binding regional agreement. Here’s the legal, economic, and diplomatic case for a governing arrangement based on law and fact.

Oil topped $100 a barrel again on Sunday. Twenty thousand seafarers are stranded on vessels in the Persian Gulf, unable to move. Roughly 230 loaded tankers sit anchored west of the strait, burning fuel and running out of provisions. A ceasefire that was supposed to reopen the world’s most critical maritime chokepoint has produced, four days in, an average of seventeen transits per day — in a corridor that previously handled one hundred and fifty. At its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz measures twenty-one nautical miles. It is, in both physical and geopolitical terms, the most consequential twenty-one miles on Earth. And right now, those twenty-one miles have no governing framework adequate to the crisis unfolding within them.

That absence is not an accident of history. It is a structural failure — one that can be corrected, and must be, before the next crisis arrives. The argument here is not that the current war should be managed differently, though it should. It is that when the guns fall silent, the international community will face a choice: rebuild on the same contested, ambiguous legal terrain that made weaponizing Hormuz so temptingly easy for Tehran, or construct a durable regional agreement for the Strait of Hormuz that gives every stakeholder — littoral states, user states, shipping companies, seafarers — a framework grounded in law and fact. The second option is harder. It is also the only one that works.

The Legal Vortex That Created This Crisis

At its narrowest, the Strait of Hormuz measures twenty-one nautical miles — a dimension unremarkable in physical terms but arguably the most consequential maritime measurement on Earth. Through this corridor, more than twenty-one million barrels of crude oil and approximately twenty percent of global liquefied natural gas trade transit daily. No other chokepoint — not Suez, not Malacca, not the Bosphorus — carries comparable systemic weight. The National

And yet the legal architecture governing it is, as one rigorous recent analysis put it, a contested patchwork of treaty law, asserted custom, domestic legislation, and unresolved doctrinal conflict — a framework whose structural ambiguities Iran has, across four decades, exploited with considerable legal sophistication. The National

The primary instrument is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Under Part III, Articles 37 to 44, the Strait falls under the regime of transit passage — a right categorically distinct from ordinary innocent passage: non-suspendable under any circumstances, applying equally to surface vessels, submarines in submerged transit, and overflight by aircraft. Diplomacy and Law Article 38 provides that all ships and aircraft enjoy the right of transit passage, and Article 44 states that bordering states shall not hamper that passage and that there shall be no suspension of it. ONEST Network

Clear enough, one might think. Except that neither Iran nor the United States is a party to UNCLOS, yet each invokes it — in mutually contradictory ways — as the authoritative statement of their respective rights. Just Security The U.S. Freedom of Navigation program treats the UNCLOS transit passage regime as reflective of customary international law and has specifically asserted navigation claims against both Iran and Oman related to transit through Hormuz. Lawfare Iran, meanwhile, insists it is not bound by a treaty it never ratified, and that wartime conditions rewrite whatever peacetime rules might otherwise apply.

This creates a situation where approximately 3,200 commercial vessels and 20,000 seafarers remain trapped in Gulf waters, caught inside a legal architecture that international maritime law was not designed to govern. House of Saud Iran has engineered a selective transit-toll franchise — permitting Chinese, Russian, and Indian-affiliated vessels through for fees settled in yuan or cryptocurrency, while obstructing passage for ships linked to what Tehran designates hostile nations — that falls outside the formal definition of a naval blockade, outside the distress provisions of international safety conventions, and outside any enforcement mechanism the International Maritime Organization possesses. House of Saud

This is not merely a crisis. It is a demonstration that the existing legal order for the Strait of Hormuz has failed, comprehensively and expensively.

The 2026 Crisis: What the Numbers Tell Us

The economic devastation wrought since February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched their air campaign against Iran and the IRGC shut the strait in response, is staggering in scale. Brent crude reached US$166 per barrel on March 19 — its highest on record. Shipping traffic has been largely blocked since the opening day of the war. The restriction of shipments by more than ninety percent — approximately ten million barrels per day — has raised energy and agricultural input costs worldwide. Wikipedia

On March 11, the thirty-two International Energy Agency member states unanimously agreed to release four hundred million barrels of oil from their emergency reserves — roughly four days’ worth of global consumption. Wikipedia The United States suspended its embargo on Russian petroleum to ease supply. California gasoline prices exceeded five dollars per gallon. The International Energy Agency characterised the disruption as the gravest shock to global energy supply since the 1973 crisis. The National

None of these emergency measures addressed the underlying problem. They were tourniquets, not surgery. Analysts warn that prices will not decline further until the strait is reopened and damaged oil facilities are repaired, and that those are “huge variables which are really, really unsolved” — meaning elevated oil prices are likely through at least the end of 2026. CNN

Meanwhile, approximately 230 loaded oil tankers remain waiting inside the Gulf. Wikipedia A ceasefire has been declared, but the maritime system has not reset. Transit through the Strait of Hormuz remains restricted, coordinated, and selectively enforced. There has been no return to open commercial navigation. Standard shipping lanes remain largely unused, and no meaningful increase in traffic has followed the ceasefire announcement. Windward

The cost of this structural void is not abstract. It is measured in dollars per barrel, in stranded seafarers, and in the food and energy insecurity of countries that had no role in causing the conflict.

Iran’s Toll Booth: A Precedent the World Cannot Accept

Among the most consequential developments of the 2026 crisis has been Tehran’s attempt to transform the Strait of Hormuz from an international maritime corridor into something closer to a managed toll road. Iran’s 10-point peace proposal explicitly included continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. Its parliament has moved to formally codify Iranian sovereignty, control, and oversight over the waterway — creating a permanent revenue stream through the collection of transit fees. Time

Several dozen ships have now reportedly paid a toll and crossed the channel under the “Tehran Toll Booth” protocol, which coordinates passage with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and directs ships around Iran’s Larak Islands, closer to the Iranian coast. Eno Center for Transportation

The legal arguments against this are powerful. Under Article 26 of UNCLOS, charges may be levied only as payment for specific services rendered to the transiting vessel, applied without discrimination. Tehran’s fee is neither linked to any service nor applied without discrimination — it is a selective toll imposed for purely coercive purposes. Just Security The International Maritime Organization warned that tolls in Hormuz would set a dangerous precedent; passage through an international strait is a right, not a service sold by the bordering state. TRT World

But the legal arguments, however sound, have not reopened the strait. That is precisely the point. Legal correctness without institutional enforcement is insufficient. The world needs a governing arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz that gives those legal principles teeth — not through unilateral military action, which risks escalation and provides no durable resolution, but through a negotiated, multilateral framework that all key stakeholders have an interest in maintaining.

What a Hormuz Governing Arrangement Could Actually Look Like

The Strait of Hormuz is not unprecedented as a governance challenge. There are workable precedents, none of them perfect, but all of them instructive.

The Montreux Convention of 1936 governs the Turkish Straits, giving Turkey defined rights to regulate warship passage during wartime while guaranteeing civilian maritime freedom. Iran has sought legal authorities analogous to those Turkey holds under Montreux, and has even proposed that Oman co-administer a similar bilateral framework. But the Montreux Convention predates UNCLOS by decades, and Article 35 of UNCLOS explicitly preserves only long-standing international conventions already in force — not a template available to other straits states by analogy. Just Security There is no Hormuz Convention yet. The argument for creating one is therefore not a capitulation to Iranian demands; it is the international community seizing the initiative to define the terms before Tehran does so unilaterally.

The Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP) provides a different model — a multilateral maritime security framework binding coastal states, user states, and the shipping industry to shared information-sharing and incident-response obligations, administered by a dedicated secretariat. It works because every party has a concrete interest in its functioning.

An analogous arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz — call it a Congress for Hormuz, or a Hormuz Maritime Security Commission — would need to reconcile three distinct sets of interests:

Littoral states — Iran and Oman — have legitimate sovereign interests in their territorial seas, navigation safety, environmental protection, and security. These interests are real and must be accommodated. Iran’s consistent position that it should have more say in managing the strait than UNCLOS currently allows is not entirely unreasonable as a political matter, even where its legal arguments are weak. Any durable arrangement must give Tehran genuine institutional standing — a seat at the table, not just a legal obligation to comply with rules it had no hand in writing.

Gulf producer states — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar — have an overwhelming economic interest in an open, predictable strait. They are also the states most exposed to Iranian leverage. The GCC has already floated proposals for multilateral maritime oversight. That political will should be formalized and channeled, not dissipated in crisis-management cycles.

Major user states — China, India, Japan, South Korea, the European Union, the United Kingdom — collectively consume the majority of the hydrocarbons that transit Hormuz. India alone, with 1.4 billion people and heavy dependence on Middle Eastern oil and gas, faces acute energy crisis risk from any sustained disruption. CNN These states have the economic leverage to make a governing arrangement attractive to all parties, and the strongest long-term interest in ensuring it works.

A Hormuz Maritime Security Commission, hosted perhaps by Oman — the one regional actor that has retained the trust of all parties throughout the crisis — could provide: a standing mechanism for navigational safety and traffic separation oversight, working with the IMO; a formal disputes procedure for incidents involving transiting vessels; agreed protocols for mine-clearance and maritime emergency response; and a permanent channel for littoral-state concerns that does not require an armed confrontation to be heard.

Why This Is Feasible Now, Not Despite the Crisis But Because of It

The standard objection to ambitious multilateral frameworks in the Gulf is that the regional distrust is too deep, the legal disagreements too fundamental, and the geopolitical interests of outside powers too divergent. All of that is true. It was also true of the Bosphorus in 1936, of the South China Sea fisheries negotiations in the 1990s, and of the Gulf of Aden counter-piracy coalitions assembled after 2008.

What changes the calculus is the cost of the alternative. Iran’s own 10-point peace proposal explicitly included a protocol to re-open the Strait of Hormuz and the creation of a regional framework ensuring safe navigation. Wikipedia That is a significant concession buried in maximalist packaging. It signals that even Tehran recognizes the strait cannot remain in its current condition indefinitely — and that Iran would prefer to manage the transition through negotiation rather than capitulation.

Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, urging extension of the ceasefire, put it plainly: “Success may require everyone to make painful concessions, but this is nothing as compared to the pain of failure and war.” Al Jazeera Oman, which sits on the southern bank of the strait and has historically maintained working relations with Tehran even through the worst of the regional tensions, is the natural convener of any multilateral process. The UN Secretary-General and the IMO have already signaled readiness to support an appropriate navigational mechanism; the infrastructure for multilateral engagement exists.

The harder question is not whether such a framework is possible. It is whether the major powers — the United States, China, and Russia — will subordinate their bilateral leverage over Iran to a genuinely multilateral process. China has an overwhelming economic interest in open passage and has already demonstrated willingness to mediate; it co-sponsored the Pakistan-China five-point initiative in late March. Russia has an interest in normalized shipping lanes that benefits its energy exports, whatever its short-term gains from elevated oil prices. The United States, having learned once again the limits of unilateral military pressure as a tool of maritime governance, should recognize that a regional arrangement it helps design is preferable to one Iran designs in its absence.

The Path Forward: Four Steps Toward a Hormuz Legal Framework Agreement

The diplomatic architecture for a Hormuz regional agreement does not need to be invented from scratch. It needs to be assembled deliberately from elements already in play.

First, the ceasefire negotiations in Pakistan and any successor talks should include a dedicated maritime track, focused specifically on navigational governance rather than embedded within the broader nuclear and sanctions framework. Mixing those files gives Iran maximum leverage to hold shipping hostage to unrelated concessions; separating them creates space for narrower, more achievable agreements.

Second, the IMO — which has both the technical expertise and the institutional neutrality — should be mandated by the UN Security Council to develop a proposed traffic management and safety framework for the strait, in consultation with Iran, Oman, the GCC states, and major user states. This gives the legal architecture international legitimacy without requiring Iranian ratification of UNCLOS as a precondition.

Third, the major user states — China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the EU — should jointly declare their support for a Hormuz International Strait Security Architecture and offer concrete economic incentives: trade agreements, investment guarantees, infrastructure financing for Iran’s civilian ports and energy sector, conditional on Iran’s participation in the governance framework. Sovereignty is not incompatible with multilateral management; the economics of cooperation must be made visible.

Fourth, and most fundamentally, the international community must accept that the legal status quo — two non-UNCLOS parties asserting contradictory interpretations of a treaty neither has ratified, over a waterway on which the global economy depends — is not a stable foundation for anything. A Strait of Hormuz treaty, negotiated multilaterally and incorporating both the customary law principles of transit passage and a formal role for the littoral states in its administration, would resolve this structural ambiguity rather than perpetuate it.

The Chokepoint That Governs Us All

The Strait of Hormuz has been weaponized before — in 1988, in 2012, in 2019, and now in 2026 with catastrophic economic consequence. Each time, the world responded with crisis management and returned, when the immediate pressure eased, to the same ambiguous baseline. Each time, the lessons went unlearned.

The argument for a governing arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz is not idealistic. It is the most realistic position available: either the international community negotiates a durable legal and institutional framework now, in the window created by the current crisis, or it waits for the next crisis to do it under worse conditions and higher prices. The legal foundation exists in customary law. The economic imperative is undeniable. The diplomatic ingredients — Oman’s credibility, China’s economic leverage, the IMO’s technical capacity, Iran’s own stated preference for a negotiated framework — are all present.

Twenty-one nautical miles. One fifth of the world’s oil. Sixty years of unresolved legal ambiguity. The strait does not ask for our attention; it commands it. The question is whether we will use this moment, finally, to respond with architecture rather than improvisation.