The US-Iran Deal and the Strait of Hormuz Problem

This week, the US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding that commits both sides to keeping the Strait of Hormuz open and completing a final nuclear agreement within 60 days—possibly longer. In exchange, Iran gets immediate relief from US economic sanctions and permission to export crude oil, according to reporting from the New York Times, ABC News, and Axios published around June 17, 2026. The agreement also extends a ceasefire, including in Lebanon, for the full 60-day negotiating window.

On the surface, this looks like a genuine reset. But the fine print on Hormuz tells a different story.

The Hormuz Contradiction

Early in June, Iran's ambassador to Moscow said the strait would stay open but with transit fees set jointly by Iran and Oman, Reuters reported. A few days later, Iran's Foreign Ministry released a legal position claiming that the entire strait lies within the territorial waters of Iran and Oman—with no international waters corridor—and that as a coastal state, Iran has the right to regulate passage and charge for maritime services. In a separate statement from late May, Iran invoked rebus sic stantibus, a legal doctrine allowing a state to suspend a treaty obligation when the conditions that existed when the treaty was signed have fundamentally changed—in this case, what Tehran calls foreign aggression.

That argument runs headlong into Article 44 of UNCLOS (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), which explicitly prohibits coastal states from charging foreign vessels for transit passage through international straits. Reuters noted in a May investigation that under international maritime law, governments cannot impose fees for safe passage. Iran is not a party to UNCLOS, but the transit-passage framework is widely considered customary international law—binding practice among states—a distinction Iran has not publicly addressed. The European Union warned in April that any pay-for-passage scheme would set a dangerous precedent for shipping routes worldwide.

What makes this especially worth watching: Reuters documented in May that Iran has already begun installing checkpoint infrastructure on its islands in the Hormuz area and negotiating bilateral deals with regional partners. It is effectively building the administrative machinery for a fee system before any international agreement permits it.

The Shipping Reality Lags Behind the Diplomacy

On the ground, the picture is slower to move. Shipping through Hormuz was nearly halted as of April 9, even though a ceasefire was technically in place, Reuters data showed. By mid-June, the world's largest tanker operator told the Financial Times it would take weeks more before traffic returned to normal. Yet Iran's Foreign Ministry has consistently maintained—including in a March statement—that the strait is not closed and that traffic has not been formally restricted. The gap between official statements and what shipping companies actually do reflects how operators make their own risk calculations independent of government assurances.

Reports from Asharq Al-Awsat, citing Iran's Fars News Agency, suggest that the maritime fee provision was added to the US-Iran framework late in negotiations—a detail that, if accurate, suggests this was a deliberate insertion rather than a mutually agreed-upon element from the start.

The 60-Day Test

The MOU's 60-day deadline is meant to produce a final nuclear agreement, with the Hormuz provisions and ceasefire acting as holding patterns in the meantime. But the transit-fee question appears unresolved in the MOU text itself—it is deferred. The final deal will need to address it directly, or Iran's parallel legal position and on-the-ground infrastructure buildout will simply become an established fact that later negotiations have to work around rather than through.

Roughly one-fifth of global oil moves through this strait. Tanker operators, energy traders, and insurance markets are now watching whether the 60-day window produces a binding legal settlement on who can charge what for passage, or whether it merely postpones a dispute that Iran's structural incentives—asserting sovereignty, raising revenue—keep very much alive.