The Strait of Hormuz and the obligation to negotiate

The Hill reports that President Trump rejected a seven-day Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and halt military operations — even while acknowledging, in the same breath, that Iran "wants to make a deal." I would ask the obvious question that every treaty negotiator must ask before declining any offer: what, precisely, was rejected, and what was offered in return?

Free navigation of international straits is not a favor one nation grants another. It is a principle embedded in the law of the sea — what we might call, in the language I knew, the law of nations. When a strait carries the commerce of dozens of countries, its closure is not merely a bilateral grievance. It is an injury to the community of trading nations, and that community has an interest in the resolution. A diplomat who declines an opening without providing a counter-proposal has not ended a negotiation; he has simply suspended it at greater cost.

I do not pretend to know the precise military or intelligence considerations that informed this decision — those lie beyond what I can assess, and I mark that plainly as the limit of my knowledge. But the shape of the problem is familiar. In my own time, the question of British interference with American shipping in the 1790s presented exactly this dilemma: popular passion counseled confrontation; patient construction of a treaty — imperfect, criticized, and yet binding — served the republic's long-term interest better than a war we were not equipped to fight. The Jay Treaty was no one's triumph. It was, however, a breathing space in which commerce resumed and the young republic survived.

Seven days is admittedly a short window for any serious agreement. A proposal of such narrow duration may be more gesture than substance. But even a gesture deserves a measured response rather than a flat rejection, because the terms of how one declines set the conditions for what comes next. If the administration believes seven days is insufficient, let it say so — and name the conditions under which a longer, verifiable arrangement might be entertained. Silence, or mere dismissal, is a posture, not a policy.

The deeper principle is this: the parties to a conflict involving a waterway of global commercial consequence bear an obligation not only to each other but to every nation whose vessels transit that strait. That obligation does not dissolve because domestic politics make negotiation uncomfortable. It accumulates, quietly, in the ledger of international credibility — and credibility, once spent, is slow to replenish. I would urge the administration to return to the table with a counter-proposal in hand, however conditional, and to let the record show that the United States preferred the resolution of law over the resolution of force wherever law could reach.