Amidst the ongoing Iranian campaign to control and close the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump promised Friday to make the waterway a “territory of the United States” – the first American overseas territory comprised of water rather than land.
“After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States,” Trump said in a speech Friday in New York. “We have the blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to . . . Essentially, [a territory is] what it is.”
Legal and political questions aside, practical matters remain on the question of U.S. sovereign control, starting with lack of presence and tactical vulnerability. Iran is rapidly reconstituting its ballistic missile force, according to Israeli intelligence, and it routinely hits merchant tankers in the southern stretch of the strait with drones. On Friday evening, it struck a vessel belonging to UAE state oil company Adnoc for the 19th time, Emirati media reported.
Meanwhile, U.S. Navy warships do not operate in Hormuz. The Navy operates a successful blockade of Iranian traffic in the Gulf of Oman, outside the strait, but no publicized U.S. Navy surface transits of the strait itself have occurred in four months. The service’s top leaders have described the lack of access to Bahrain’s storehouses as an obstacle to resupply operations for its Arabian Sea task force, implying that U.S. Military Sealift Command auxiliaries do not access the Gulf.
“It’s clear the US president, with a chuckle as he said that, even himself, is not taking this particularly seriously,” Al Jazeera reporter Kimberly Halkett said. “What the US president is not backing down on is the fact that there is a naval blockade by the United States in effect.”
Iran maintains that it should have the right to fully control navigation in the strait, including the right to levy fees for passage. At minimum, it believes that control should belong jointly to Iran and Oman (the strait’s coastal states), and it is negotiating with Omani officials on a mechanism for shared management.
“The Strait of Hormuz has been Iranian, is Iranian, and will remain Iranian; this strait will only be closed and opened under Iran’s command,” responded Iranian deputy foreign minister Kazem Gharibabadi in a statement aimed at Trump. “As long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and cease your fanciful delusions, Iran will continue to enforce the blockade.”
Despite the Iranian blockade, oil continues to flow out of the strait at a reduced rate. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright estimates the volume at 9 million barrels per day, while independent analysts put it at 4-5 million barrels daily. Adnoc is known to be supply logistics for not only its own oil, but for Iraqi volumes as well, largely by the use of a trans-Hormuz shuttle program it operates using its own tanker fleet.
Bloomberg’s Javier Blas suggests that these covert flows are part of the reason that oil prices remain well below $100 per barrel, despite the ostensible shutdown. In addition to demand destruction and a sharp (and as-yet-unexplained) drop in Chinese imports, pipeline volumes to Fujairah and Yanbu have soared and the Adnoc shuttle route is moving more crude than previously believed – all despite Iranian efforts to shut off its GCC neighbors from the sea.
