A modest proposal for the dispute over the strait: a shared pact between the Gulf States

The result is a blockage that affects one fifth of the world’s oil supply and a bitter dispute that has brought both countries back into open conflict.

Despite the president’s repeated assurances Donald Trump Since Iran has no navy and the strait is open to passage, maritime traffic has plummeted amid renewed Iranian attacks on merchant ships.

Diplomacy has virtually ground to a halt, and over the weekend, U.S. and Iranian forces continued to trade attacks in the region.

Military experts believe that trying to open by force such a narrow and vulnerable passage in the middle of war would be a deadly and endless task.

In search of answers, a group of analysts has proposed a possible engagement model for the Persian Gulf.

It is based on a somewhat unknown treaty, now defunct, that once regulated the collective production of coal and steel in Europe after World War II.

The group’s proposal, detailed in a report published this month, is this: the Gulf countries would treat it as a shared territory—a kind of regional commons—and charge a symbolic fee only to the oil tankers for the maintenance of the waters.

This could conform to international law, satisfy Iran’s demand for greater control and give the eight Gulf littoral states a stake in peacekeeping, according to the group.

“If we can’t imagine a world where these countries administer a token fee to do maritime security and environmental work, then that’s kind of an indicator of whether there will be some path to a more lasting regional peace,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, founder and chief executive of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a London-based think tank focused on development and diplomacy in the Middle East and the broader region.

“Until we achieve this type of more basic cooperation, we will not be able to move forward on the most important issues,” he added in a telephone interview.

The main idea underlying the proposal is that the situation in the Persian Gulf is analogous to that in Europe at the end of World War II.

In the midst of the struggle to recover from two bloody and devastating conflicts, Robert Schuman, Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, rejected trying to isolate Germany as was done after the First World War.

Instead, France and Germany collaborated on the production of coal and steel, two key components for weapons manufacturing, under an agreement known as the European Coal and Steel Community.

This made war between the two historic rivals “not only unthinkable, but materially impossible,” Schuman declared in 1950.

France and Germany were joined by Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, a coalition that ultimately led to the creation of the European Union.

Achieving such a union in the Gulf would involve overcoming multiple obstacles, including divergent political agendas and historical rivalries.

Still, the current alternative, attempting to open the strait by military force, would be daunting.

The Pentagon has been planning for decades how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in the event of conflict, said Mara Karlin, a professor of national security at the Universidad Johns Hopkinswho led strategic military planning during the Biden administration as deputy secretary of defense.

Mine clearance is incredibly slow and grueling work, and the few U.S. Navy ships designed for it would be exposed, he said, so a armistice as a precondition.

“Reopening has focused almost exclusively on a permissive environment because it is considered too difficult to attempt to reopen and carry out the painstaking demining process when a single attack restarts the entire mission,” he said.

Placing a single new mine, or even threatening to do so, can deter shipping.

Another method would be for the United States or some international coalition to provide escorts.

This procedure was used by the US Navy to protect Kuwaiti-flagged oil tankers coming under Iranian attack towards the end of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

This led to frequent skirmishes with Iranian forces, and a warship that struck a mine nearly sank.

In the years since, Iran has developed much more agile threats, including drones and missiles fired from mobile launchers or the fast attack boats employed by the Revolutionary Guard, sometimes called its “mosquito fleet”.

“We may be able to neutralize their ability to intercept shipping, but all it takes is one speedboat, a couple of mines, or a few drones getting through, and they’ve effectively blocked commerce again,” said Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to several countries in the region, including Iraq and Kuwait.

Neutralizing Iranian attacks would require extensive deployment of ground forces to control Iran’s extensive coastline, greatly increasing the risk of American casualties.

“I think to date it has been considered that we can reopen the Strait, but not in a time frame or at a cost that would be considered acceptable,” said Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

Iran has insisted that Article 5 of the Memorandum of Understanding that the United States and Iran signed on June 17 gives it full authority to restore normal shipping.

He has accused the United States of trying to undermine his negotiating power by opening an alternative shipping channel around the coast of Oman on the western side of the Strait of Hormuz.

In their report, Batmanghelidj and his colleague Mehran Haghirian of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation point out that sprawling Gulf ports, such as Jebel Ali in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, already charge service fees to ships using their facilities, so It wouldn’t be a big leap. grant similar authority to a supranational body that distributes revenue.

According to the authors, the most logical measure would be to apply these rates to the largest oil tankers that transit the Gulf annually, including 600 supertankers that make multiple trips.

The annual value of oil shipments is around $600 billion, according to the International Energy Agency.

Shipping companies would barely notice a small surcharge, and oil tankers pose the greatest risk of environmental damage, the report says.

Six Gulf Arab states—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, all allies of the United States—already belong to an organization called the Gulf Cooperation Council.

While often effective in establishing collective guidelines on everyday issues such as industrialization, the organization is known for its constant divisions when it comes to joint political action.

According to Batmanghelidj, adding Iran and Iraq to the equation could make the council even more unstablea concern expressed by some European officials.

They consider the Middle East to be permanently ravaged by conflict, but France and Germany had the same reputation after World War II, he noted.

The key question is whether the United States and Iran would agree.

The Islamic Republic’s official news agency published a lengthy essay on July 10 expressing interest in a collective agreement, and also reproduced Bourse & Bazaar’s proposal.

“The Strait of Hormuz is not simply a passage for the exchange of goods and energy, but an opportunity for regional cooperation,” the IRNA article noted.

“If properly managed, its economic and financial benefits can be shared more equitably among countries in the region.”

Iranian national security “depends on preserving the Iranian agreements governing the Strait of Hormuz,” General Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament and chief negotiator, said in a statement Wednesday.

At the same time, “we must also use the tools of diplomacy and negotiation to achieve and realize our national interests,” he added.

It is impossible to predict how Trump will respond to such a proposal. Senior US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have insisted that the Strait of Hormuz return to the unrestricted international shipping that existed before the war.

That seemed to be Trump’s position. He then suggested charging a 20% tariff on all cargo in exchange for the US Navy protecting the strait, before withdrawing the proposal 24 hours later.

According to analysts, one of the main current obstacles is the lack of well-defined political objectives on the part of the United States. “I think the biggest drawback now is the uncertainty about the US position,” said Crocker, the former ambassador.

“The Gulf states certainly need those kinds of long-term guarantees from the United States before they are willing to take action, whether unilateral or collective.”