A tugboat guides a ship at the Khor Fakkan Container Terminal, the only natural deep-sea port in the region and one of the major container ports in Sharjah Emirate, along the Gulf of Oman, on July 14.
AFP via Getty Images
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AFP via Getty Images
In late June, shortly after the United States and Iran agreed on a ceasefire, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) announced an operation to move trapped ships and more than 11,000 seafarers out of the Strait of Hormuz. The strategic international waterway has been effectively closed by the Iranian regime since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February.
The IMO said the operation would be carried out in close cooperation with Iran, Oman, all other coastal states in the region, the United States and the maritime industry.
The ships were directed to take a route along the southern side of the Strait of Hormuz, hugging Oman’s coastline, rather than a route along Iran’s coastline on the northern side of the strait.
“Over 100 ships out of the 600 plus that were in the area … managed to get out,” says John Canias, a former seafarer and now a maritime operations coordinator with the International Transport Workers Federation, who took part in discussions about the evacuation.
The operation ground to a halt a couple of days later after a vessel, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship called the Ever Lovely, was attacked while using the route closest to Oman, according to MarineTraffic, which tracks ship movements. Ship traffic around the Strait of Hormuz stalled again.
Although no one claimed responsibility, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard criticized the operation because it was done without any kind of Iranian involvement, according to the state broadcaster IRIB, and that only Iran could decide what routes ships would take. Canias says the attack was frustrating.
“This is almost like a Groundhog Day, right? There is a potential opening and there isn’t,” he says.
Before the war, about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passed freely through the Strait of Hormuz. Now Iran controls the strait, threatening freedom of navigation and setting a dangerous precedent for other waterways. The ongoing fighting between the U.S. and Iran is largely over control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Gregory Brew, senior analyst at Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm, says Tehran sees itself as having the upper hand in the conflict with the U.S. and is trying to impose a new status quo in the strait.
“Any ships coming and going have to coordinate with them, have to get clearance from them,” he says. “And they’re pushing back against any effort by the United States to undermine that position.”
But the Strait of Hormuz is considered an international waterway, critical for the global economy. Todd Huntley, director of the National Security Law Program at Georgetown University, and a retired Navy lawyer, says trying to claim ownership of the strait goes against a long tradition of freedom of navigation.
“The entire reason the U.S. Navy was reformed after the Revolutionary War was to ensure that … U.S. commercial vessels and other vessels were free to transit anywhere in the oceans,” he says.
Huntley says officially recognizing Iran as having control of the Strait of Hormuz could set a dangerous precedent because other countries could also claim important waterways.
“You know, the U.K. or Morocco claiming control over the Strait of Gibraltar or Malaysia … claiming control over the Malacca Strait,” the main shipping channel between the Pacific and the Indian oceans, he says. “There is the risk that other countries are going to claim control and then either surcharging or imposing restrictions on how ships can transit.”
Countries with unilateral control could also use strategic waterways to settle territorial disputes, or as weapons, says Ami Daniel, the CEO of Windward, a maritime intelligence group.
“Russia could say, well, we’re not going to let U.S. ships go through the Northern Passage or the Arctic,” he says. “Or China could say, well, you know, if you’re an American business, you’re not going to ship through the Taiwan Straits.“
Nitya Labh, a fellow in the International Security Program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, says threats to waterways have existed throughout history. But she says many waterways have mechanisms in place to avoid conflict.
“The Turkish Straits are managed by something called the Montreux Convention, which was specifically designed to protect those waterways during conflicts,” she says. The Strait of Malacca, between the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia, she adds, is also carefully managed through a series of agreements between the regional countries in Southeast Asia because there were worries about threats.
“The Strait of Hormuz is one of many that didn’t have as many insurance and diplomatic mechanisms built in,” she says.
There are international norms and treaties to help govern global waterways, such as the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which neither Iran nor the U.S. have ratified. Labh says maritime law means little to a country like Iran, or to non-state actors like Yemen’s Houthis who attacked more than 190 commercial ships in the Red Sea a couple of years ago, causing major disruptions to global trade. Labh says there is concern about how to protect international waterways.
“I think the world is coming to terms with the fact that this international order, these trading rules, these maritime laws didn’t necessarily deliver more security the way that they were supposed to,” she says.
President Trump’s assertion last week, which he quickly backed away from, that the U.S. could control the Strait of Hormuz and collect tolls itself, likely did little to quell concerns about the independence of international waterways.