Iran Demands War Compensation for Strait Reopening

There are unnumbered crews aboard the tankers now anchored at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, men from Manila and Mumbai and Piraeus, who did not sign on for hostage duty and yet sit at the disposal of a dispute they have no part in settling. Behind them are the refineries of Rotterdam and Yokohama, the diesel pumps of Lagos, the fertilizer plants that keep grain moving in a hundred countries - all of them waiting on a single channel of water that Iran now proposes to reopen only on terms it alone has drafted, including compensation for war damages it alone will define.

The Geneva Conventions, which I helped build, protect the wounded and the shipwrecked; they say nothing directly about a strait. But the customary law of the sea, developed alongside them and echoed in the San Remo Manual on naval warfare, holds that neutral and civilian shipping in an international strait may not be obstructed as an instrument of coercion outside the narrow bounds of a declared and proportionate blockade. Iran has declared no blockade recognized by any tribunal. It has issued a list. A list is not a legal instrument. A list is a ransom note dressed in the language of diplomacy, and the distinction matters because ransom notes do not obligate anyone, while blockades - however brutal - at least summon a body of law that both sides are bound to argue over.

Oman’s presence in this matter is the one institutional fact that gives me any comfort, because Oman is behaving exactly as a neutral intermediary should - not endorsing Tehran’s demands, not amplifying them, simply carrying them to where they can be assessed. This is the same function the Red Cross performs between belligerents who cannot speak to each other directly: not advocacy, not judgment, but the unglamorous work of ensuring that a message reaches its recipient intact. Whether Muscat has the leverage to convert this channel into an actual settlement is a separate question from whether it is playing its assigned role correctly. So far, it is.

War damages are properly adjudicated after hostilities, through claims commissions, through documented loss, through processes that examine evidence from all parties - not extracted as the price of admission for lawful commerce to resume. A field hospital does not refuse the wounded until the army that shelled it agrees to pay for the roof. It treats the wounded, and it seeks compensation afterward, through channels built for that purpose, because reversing the order turns a humanitarian or economic necessity into a hostage and turns the injured party - in this case, every tanker owner and every nation buying that oil - into a debtor before any court has heard the case.

The institutional gap here is not the absence of rules but the absence of anyone empowered to test Iran’s claims against them. There is no tribunal currently seized of this dispute, no monitoring body verifying what “war damages” means in Tehran’s accounting, no independent register of the ships and crews currently idled in the anchorages off Fujairah and Salalah. Oman can carry messages. It cannot adjudicate. And so the list stands unexamined, its legitimacy neither confirmed nor denied, while diesel prices and grain shipments absorb the cost of that vacuum.

What the law requires is straightforward even where enforcement is not: civilian passage through an international strait is not currency, and compensation claims belong in front of arbitrators, not at the entrance to a waterway. What remains unmet is the mechanism to say so with any authority. Until such a mechanism exists, the strait stays a lever, the list stays unaudited, and the crew of some anonymous tanker keeps counting the days from a deck they cannot leave, waiting on terms they were never shown.