Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Arthur Michelino
Trump’s suggestion that the United States and Iran might co-administer toll revenues in the Strait of Hormuz has been walked back by the White House within hours. Actually, there is not even a serious reason to believe the joint venture specifically survives the two-week ceasefire window as policy. The toll is a different matter. It is, in the terms most commentators have reached for, an improvised sentence from an undisciplined president, and the institutional distance between a presidential aside and a committed policy position is, in this administration, well-documented enough to make the proposal easy to dismiss. And yet a proposal that will not happen can still be worth reading carefully, not for what it intends but for what it involuntarily discloses about the structural moment in which it was produced.
For several weeks before Trump spoke, the IRGC had been running a de facto access regime in the strait, requiring ships to provide documentation including ownership records, cargo details, and routing information through IRGC-linked intermediaries before receiving escorted passage. Payments are settled in yuan or cryptocurrency through networks operating largely outside Western banking infrastructure. This regime is already operating in a legal gap, and the toll it implies is not a hypothetical. It is part of the active negotiation over what the post-war strait looks like. Iran’s parliament is simultaneously advancing legislation to formalize the arrangement through its 1993 Marine Areas Act. The legislation asserts sovereign authority over the waterway on domestic legal grounds rather than through UNCLOS, which Iran signed but never ratified and which the United States never ratified either, though Washington treats its core transit passage provisions as binding customary law.
Ships from China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and several other states deemed friendly transit freely, as others are held or turned away. The ceasefire, meanwhile, is conditioned on a reopening of the strait under arrangements that Iran has publicly framed as requiring coordination with its armed forces. That position consolidates what the preceding weeks have made operational and carries no precedent in the waterway’s modern history.
What those changes dissolve is something that has functioned less as a rule than as an assumption, stable enough to have ceased registering as a choice, namely that Hormuz belongs in operational terms to no one in particular. That assumption holds because American naval dominance, consolidated since the 1980s, makes the ownership question unnecessary to ask, or rather, unnecessary to ask aloud. The war makes it necessary.
The result is not a restored baseline but something more unsettled: Iran holds operational control; the United States holds military superiority it has demonstrated but not translated into a durable political outcome. Between two parties that the prior order keeps structurally apart, a shared problem has appeared. Who administers the strait going forward, under what authority, and to whose account?
That question has no obvious addressee under the prior framework, none that anyone has needed to name. It is not clear it has a settled one now either, but it has, for the first time, parties who cannot avoid it. And beyond those two parties, a much wider set of actors finds itself inside that reconfiguration without having chosen to enter it: Gulf producers, the intermediaries already settling payments in yuan, and the Asian economies whose dependence on Hormuz throughput ranges from fifty percent for China and India to over seventy percent for Japan and South Korea, which is why their governments were negotiating transit directly with Tehran rather than waiting for the ceasefire to resolve the question.
What the complexity literature describes as the edge-of-chaos interval is the period in which the constraints holding a system in its prior configuration have broken down but the new equilibrium has not yet consolidated. It is in that interval, I want to suggest, that the shared problem becomes analytically legible, which is to say something more than a diplomatic inconvenience. The property that seems to matter here, at least for this argument, is specific. Combinations between previously separated components become available that the prior order had structurally foreclosed.
The war dissolves the constraint rather than creating the possibility. What the joint venture names, perhaps without yet knowing what it has named, is the adjacency that dissolution leaves behind. Neither party chooses it, and neither has yet decided what to do with it, but the system places them inside it in a way the prior framework would not have permitted.
Its concrete expression is already visible in the ceasefire terms themselves. An American president and an Iranian government are negotiating the administrative conditions of a waterway the prior framework had placed entirely outside the domain of bilateral arrangement. That negotiation is happening not despite the war but because of what the war has undone, and the toll, whatever form it eventually takes, is one of its central terms. The legal framework has not changed. Whether that distinction retains practical force in a waterway where the operational reality has already moved is, at minimum, an open question.
Six days after American bombers were over Iranian territory, Trump produces a revenue-sharing sentence about the bombed party before the damage has been assessed, which invites the natural reading of naivety, perhaps surrealism. The more precise reading, I want to suggest, is that the absence of strategic filtering is not incidental to the logic. It is what allows the transactional instinct to reach the adjacency before the institutional mechanisms that would otherwise suppress or reframe it have had time to engage.
Doux commerce, as Montesquieu argued in his Spirit of Laws in 1748, does not dissolve enmity through moral progress but through something more structural. The adversary and the trading partner are categories that mutual interest tends over time to collapse. This happens not because merchants are virtuous but because sustained enmity is expensive in ways that a logic organized around fixed categories of friend and enemy cannot readily accommodate. Trump’s proposal bears only a superficial resemblance to what Montesquieu had in mind, and the distinction is worth being precise about.
Doux commerce, in Montesquieu’s account, is not a mechanism for immediate financial extraction. It is a long-term civilizing process whose benefits accumulate across multiple layers of society, shaping institutions, softening manners, and building the kind of reciprocal dependency that makes sustained conflict increasingly irrational. What Trump proposes has none of that structural depth. It is commerce reduced to its skeleton: a revenue arrangement, immediate, bilateral, transactional, with no civilizing ambition and no expectation of accumulated interdependence.
He arrives at it without the theory, or without anything resembling it, and that is what makes the proposal both the purer and the more troubling illustration of the mechanism. The commercial logic reaches the revenue conclusion at the moment the shared problem becomes visible, because nothing in Trump’s operating framework requires anything else.
There is a further implication that the proposal carries, perhaps without intending to. A joint venture between Washington and Tehran over Hormuz revenues does not merely reposition the two parties negotiating it. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE, the states whose energy exports and whose economic survival run through the strait, find themselves inside an arrangement they have not been invited to join and from which geography offers no exit.
The structural unusualness of the arrangement is worth pausing on. Iran is not simply an adversary in the generic sense. It is the regional enemy, the state around whose containment the Gulf order was organized since the Iranian Revolution; the power whose influence the Gulf states built their security architecture and their relationship with Washington to constrain.
A joint venture between Washington and Tehran does not just create a new commercial arrangement between two belligerents. It creates a new bilateral equilibrium over a chokepoint that everyone else in the region transits under sufferance, administered by the two parties with the most immediate leverage, one of whom depends on it for barely two percent of its own energy imports. The arrangement is structured around their interests, extracting value from the transit dependency of the very states whose containment strategy it implicitly dissolves. That equilibrium is, in a precise sense, predatory. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE would find themselves paying, in effect, into a commercial arrangement negotiated between Washington and the regional adversary their foreign policy was built to balance, with no seat at the table and no exit from the geography. That none of them appear in Trump’s sentence is not incidental to the Trumpian version of doux commerce. It is, perhaps, the most consequential thing about it.
The predatory geometry extends further than the Gulf. European states, whose energy security has rested on the assumption that American naval power would keep Hormuz open without charge and whose gas prices have already doubled since the closure regardless of their modest direct exposure to the strait, would find themselves paying into a Washington-Tehran toll arrangement for access to supply lines they had previously treated as a public good. Those payments would flow through Iranian and Chinese financial infrastructure operating largely outside the Western banking system they regulate and depend on.
Trump has argued for a decade that NATO allies have free-ridden on American security guarantees without paying their share. The Hormuz joint venture does not make that argument. It simply prices it, structuring a consequence that the burden-sharing complaint had always implied but never operationalized. Whether or not Trump intended that implication, it sits inside the sentence he produced, and European chancelleries studying the ceasefire terms will not have missed it. The European Commission’s response, issued the same day, was to describe the strait as a public good for all humanity and to call any toll arrangement unlawful. That is the clearest possible statement of the prior order’s position, and it confirms that the implications of Trump’s sentence registered exactly as the structure of the moment would predict.
Denmark collected transit dues through the Øresund from 1429 until the Copenhagen Convention of 1857 forced their abolition through a collective compensation mechanism, and the sequence repays attention here. What ended that system was not the legal argument against it, available and well-articulated throughout, but the organized economic interest of maritime powers in a compensated resolution that eliminated the uncertainty the dues created. The Hormuz situation carries enough structural resemblance to make the parallel worth holding onto.
The revenue figures now in circulation, roughly six hundred million dollars monthly from oil traffic at the reported fee level, suggest that what Iran has activated carries sufficient economic weight to generate exactly that kind of organized interest. Any durable resolution will need to price the new configuration in some form. Reasserting the framework the war has already shown to be more conditional than it appeared is unlikely to be sufficient.
The joint venture will not be built. Within twenty-four hours of proposing it, Trump was warning Iran on Truth Social that any toll charges should stop immediately, confirming that the instinct and the institution operate on entirely different timescales and that it is in the gap between them that the signal worth reading was always located. The toll is a different problem. It runs counter to the transit passage principles that international maritime law has treated as binding customary norms for decades, and the legal objections to it are well-articulated and widely shared. Whether those objections retain practical force when neither party to the dispute has ratified the convention that codifies them is, as this piece has tried to suggest, precisely the open question the war has left behind. What the proposal may disclose is that the prior order’s answer to the ownership question, which was to suppress it through enforcement and leave it unresolved, has become more expensive to maintain than the question itself. Montesquieu wrote that peace is the natural effect of trade. What the war may have produced, rather more directly, is the conditions under which trade becomes the only available logic, and the price at which it operates is now being negotiated.
