\n<\/p>\n
The Price of Peace May Be a Persian Gulf Oil Toll<\/strong><\/p>\n Welcome back to Friday! This is our toll-free selection of news items from the past seven days that we thought deserved more attention.<\/p>\n This week, the war almost escalated into the destruction of an ancient civilization; but instead it turned into an argument about toll collection<\/strong>. Progress and peace!<\/p>\n The U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire this week. It was almost immediately declared a failure by the legacy media and the Democrats<\/strong>. What\u2019s more, many declared that Iran had somehow won the war even though its senior political and military leadership have been shuffled off into the great beyond, its navy lies at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, its nuclear and drone capacity has been destroyed, and its ability to project force beyond its borders had been degraded significantly.<\/p>\n Chris Murphy, the Democrat Senator from Connecticut, declared on X that the Iran campaign was a failure because an Islamist regime still runs the place. This is the kind of demented maximalist definition of victory<\/strong> that would result in the U.S. fighting a Forever War until we finally limped home in defeat. It was never the goal of Operation Epic Fury to unseat the Islamic militants in Iran. The point was to make them less dangerous to everyone else, especially America.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to escape the impression that many of Trump\u2019s critics are hoping the ceasefire fails because it undermines their narrative that we were somehow in an inescapable\u00a0quagmire<\/strong>\u00a0that was tearing apart the forces of the Make America Great Again right and bringing ruination to the U.S. economy.\u00a0It\u2019s super annoying to the TDS crowd that the U.S. military may have actually completed the mission in the six-week time frame President Trump set out when this thing started.<\/p>\n We expect the ceasefire will lead to a more persistent peace because neither the U.S. nor Iran has much of an upside in prolonging the fighting<\/strong>. There\u2019s not really that many militarily significant targets left to bomb in Iran, and Iran would very much like to stop being bombed. They are not gaining anything by bombing their Persian Gulf neighbors, either. So, why keep it up when an end to the war is within their grasp?<\/p>\n President Trump on Thursday warned Iran that it should not charge a toll for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz<\/strong>, which seemed to contradict what he said<\/a> to ABC\u2019s Jonathan Karl earlier in the week. Maybe he was only joking when he said he was thinking of making the toll a \u201cjoint venture\u201d with Iran and called it a \u201cbeautiful thing.\u201d That might not seem like something you would joke about, but would you stand next to the Easter Bunny while making a speech about the war?<\/p>\n President Donald Trump speaks next to the Easter Bunny on the balcony of the White House during the Easter Egg Roll on April 6, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Iran has long had the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. It held off for two reasons. First, because it viewed the option value of the threat to close the strait as a valuable deterrent against military strikes<\/strong> against it. Last month, it learned it had overestimated the deterrent value. Why was the closure threat less valuable than it thought? In part because the U.S. might not have found the threat credible. But also because the U.S. and the entire world is far less dependent on Persian Gulf oil than it was, largely thanks to the expansion of U.S. production.<\/p>\n The second reason it held off is that it likely overestimated the willingness of European nations to challenge its control of the strait<\/strong>. What it learned\u2014and what the U.S. learned\u2014is that Europe is unwilling to use kinetic force to defend its access to Persian Gulf oil or the principle of open navigation in international waterways. It turns out that the international law of the seas really does mean letters and memos.<\/p>\n So, what happens now? Europe and the Persian Gulf nations are declaring Iran\u2019s tolls a violation of international law and completely unacceptable. The latest word from President Trump is that Iran had \u201cbetter not\u201d charge tolls. But Iran has shown it can close the strait altogether, and no one has the combination of will and ability to stop them. \u201cThis shall not stand!\u201d<\/strong> they boldly declare\u2014which sounds a lot like \u201cI stand with Ukraine\u201d but without the promise of gun-money and tactical support. Talking about standing isn\u2019t the same thing as actually taking a stand.<\/p>\n \u201cThis cannot stand. The Iranian regime must not be allowed to turn the seven other states that border the Persian Gulf, most of them good friends of the United States, into its vassals. Nor should the rest of the world submit to Iran\u2019s extortions,\u201d\u00a0Niall Ferguson, Richard Haass, and Philip Zelikow declared<\/a> this week in the pages of the\u00a0Free Press<\/em>.<\/p>\n Despite the protests, there is a lot of precedent for a toll in the strait<\/strong>. Egypt charges a toll for passage through the Suez Canal. The Panama Canal is tolled. The fact that those are canals rather than natural straits is an interesting distinction but not one that explains why those tolls would be acceptable but a Hormuz toll would not. If it ever made sense to distinguish between them on the grounds that we want to compensate the builders of canals for the expense of construction, that justification would not seem to apply a century later. What\u2019s more, neither canal is still controlled by those who built it. What\u2019s more, the Montreux Convention permits Turkey to collect fees for ships passing through Black Sea straits.<\/p>\n The international law of the seas is not something carved in stone tablets by Poseidon. It\u2019s the result of pragmatic compromises by the world\u2019s major naval powers<\/strong>, an agreement about what they think is fair game and what is not. It carries with it an implicit threat: if you violate these rules, you will be punished. This is a very old tradition. The U.S. didn\u2019t secure its freedom in the Mediterranean by declaring Barbary piratism would not stand. It did by actually sending the marines to fight in Tripoli. Similarly, the British didn\u2019t free the Persian Gulf from the control of the Qawasim confederation by writing letter of protests. They sent the British navy to fight. In any case, as circumstances change, the law of the seas changes.\u00a0The tides of history, if you will.<\/p>\n We think there\u2019s likely to be some kind of toll in the strait. And so do Ferguson and company. It will not be called a toll, of course. It will be something like a Persian Gulf Security and Navigation fee<\/strong>. Here\u2019s how the Free Press<\/em> describes the outcome:<\/p>\nWar Is Over if You Want It<\/h2>\n
The Hormuz Strait Toll<\/h2>\n
Tolls for Me But Not for Thee<\/h2>\n
\n