Iran is not closing the sea. It is selling it, and Tokyo has been quoted a price

HereandNow opinions Iran is not closing the sea. It is selling it, and Tokyo has been quoted a price Today 05:04 am JST Today | 05:05 am JST 0 Comments By Imran Khalid Two men wade in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz with vessels anchored in the background, off Bandar Abbas, Iran. Image: Razieh Poudat/ISNA via AP KARACHI Marco Rubio used his opening remarks at the ASEAN meeting in Manila on Wednesday to warn about a world in which a nation-state decides to control an international waterway, charges a toll, and blows up the ships that refuse to pay.

He was describing something that has been operating for five months. Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz on February 28, the day American and Israeli aircraft opened the war. What came next was not a blockade in the old sense.

Intermediaries linked to the Revolutionary Guard began quoting prices, reportedly up to $2 million a voyage, with clearance confirmed by radio. Ships that pay, sail. That is not a siege.

That is a business. Last week's news in the Red Sea is a different animal wearing similar clothes, and most of the commentary has run the two together. The Saudi-flagged product tanker Encelia caught fire after being struck southwest of Al Shuqaiq on Wednesday.

Yahya Saree, the Houthi military spokesman, said his forces had hit two Saudi tankers for violating a ban. That ban is an embargo on Saudi ports, announced on Monday and delivered by email to shipping companies, in retaliation for a Saudi strike on Sanaa airport. Nobody in Sanaa is collecting a fee.

It is a belligerent act inside a twelve-year war, and the Houthis have not asked for a cent. The distinction is the whole story. Embargoes end when wars end.

Prices, once established, tend to survive the conditions that produced them. So the threat to freedom of navigation is not that the ocean is being closed. It is that passage is being converted from a right into a product, and then sorted by customer.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi put the design on the record in March, telling Kyodo News that Iran had not closed the strait at all: it was shut only to vessels belonging to countries attacking Iran, and open to everyone else. Japanese ships, he said, could pass. Japan is the most exposed large economy on the planet to what happens in that waterway.

Ninety-three percent of its crude imports move through Hormuz. On March 16 the government began releasing 80 million barrels, roughly 45 days of domestic demand, from reserves that run to 470 million barrels in total. April crude imports from the Middle East fell 63.

7 percent against a year earlier. The Japanese Shipowners' Association counted five Japan-affiliated vessels through the strait across March, April and May. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has said the country can cover its needs into early 2027.

Those numbers describe a state with every reason to accept the offer, and the reserve depth to negotiate calmly rather than take the first price. Tokyo would not have to reflag anything, join a coalition, or fire a shot. It would only have to remain, quietly, not an enemy.

The obvious objection is that none of this is new and the system always recovers. Suez stayed shut for eight years after 1967. During the Tanker War of the 1980s, more than 400 ships were attacked in these same waters; by the close of 1987 Iraq had struck shipping 283 times and Iran 168, killing 116 merchant sailors.

Oil kept moving. Insurance got expensive and the world paid it. That objection fails on one point.

In 1984 and in 1967, nobody was selling passage. Baghdad and Tehran were trying to destroy each other's export revenue, and Cairo was making a political statement with a canal. Destruction is a wartime instrument, and it stops when the fighting does.

A tariff with a rate card, a clearance procedure and a discount for friendly flags is not a wartime instrument. It is an institution in its first year of operation, and institutions in their first year are the ones that get copied. Which is why the eleventh consecutive night of American strikes on Iranian targets will not resolve this, and neither will naval escort.

Warships protect hulls. They cannot un-price a right that has already been priced, and every convoy that sails under guard concedes the underlying claim: that safe passage is now something arranged rather than assumed. Traffic figures show the market has already absorbed the lesson.

Hormuz crossings dropped 31 percent in a single day on July 21, with Bab el-Mandeb down 34 percent, because operators are pricing risk faster than any government can talk it down. Rubio's warning about the precedent migrating to Asia was aimed at Beijing without naming it, and he is right about the direction while wrong about the mechanism. The thing to watch in this region is not a Chinese blockade of the Malacca Strait.

It is a Chinese schedule of fees, offered first to countries with which relations are warm, withheld from those with which they are not. Iran has now demonstrated that this ca