A strait by any name still binds the nations that use it

CNBC reports that the U.S. Energy Secretary has confirmed more than seventeen million barrels of oil transited the Strait of Hormuz on a single day — a wartime record — while the administration floats the idea of renaming the passage after the sitting president. I will take the volume of oil first, and the name second, because that is the order in which they matter.

Seventeen million barrels in a day is not a statistic; it is a measure of interdependence. Every nation whose commerce moves through that strait — whether as buyer, seller, or carrier — has an implicit stake in the convention governing passage. That convention is not the gift of any single power. It derives from centuries of what we called the law of nations and what modern practice calls customary international law: the principle that strategically vital narrows may not be closed to peaceful transit without consequence to the power that closes them. I could not have known the engineering of oil tankers, but I knew the shape of this problem from the moment Britain threatened to close the sea-lanes during our Revolution.

The name proposed for the strait is, I confess, the lesser concern — though not a trivial one. A diplomat's first instrument is language, and language that announces a claim of possession over waters that belong to no single nation is language chosen carelessly. When I negotiated what became known as the Jay Treaty, I was criticized for conceding too much to Britain on the question of maritime rights. My critics were not wrong that the concessions were painful. But the alternative — a war we could not yet sustain, fought over a principle we had not yet the strength to enforce — would have been the greater folly. Words in a treaty, or words on a map, carry weight precisely because other parties read them and draw inferences. A name that implies sovereignty invites a counter-assertion of sovereignty, and counter-assertions in a strait carrying seventeen million barrels a day are not academic.

I speak with humility on the specific instruments of modern energy markets and the naval arrangements that presently govern the Persian Gulf — these are beyond what I could have known. But the shape of the question is familiar: when a chokepoint is essential to the commerce of many nations, the power that seeks to rename or control it assumes a burden of obligation proportional to its claim. If the United States wishes the world to regard it as the guarantor of free passage, it must behave as a guarantor, not as a proprietor.

What should be done is plain, if not easy. The administration should distinguish sharply between rhetorical gesture and legal claim. If no formal assertion of sovereignty is intended, say so clearly — in writing, through the proper diplomatic channels — so that trading partners and rival powers do not mistake a headline for a policy. And if the strait's security genuinely requires new multilateral arrangements, then negotiate them in the open, with the parties whose commerce depends on the outcome. A treaty made carefully, even an imperfect one, is worth more than a name chosen hastily. The public faith of the Republic is built one kept obligation at a time.