The declaration came Monday, in capital letters. The United States, Trump posted, 'will be, from this point forward, known as THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,' and 'will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security' [1]. On Fox and Friends that morning he had said the quiet part first: 'we're taking over the strait... we'll probably run it' [4]. Own it, run it, tax it - a fifth of the world's oil at 20 percent.
The most authoritative rebuttal to this plan was delivered eighteen days ago by the man who runs American foreign policy. On June 25, at a Gulf meeting in Bahrain, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was rejecting a proposal - from Iran - to charge vessels for passage through Hormuz. 'International waterways do not belong to any nation state,' Rubio said [2]. He went further, warning that if the world accepted that a country 'can charge money to use an international waterway because it happens to be near your territorial space,' the practice would 'spread throughout the world like a contagion' [2]. 'No country,' he said, 'is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway' [2].
No country. That was the US position on June 25, stated to reject exactly the toll Trump announced on July 13 - with the only change being the name of the country proposing to collect it.
The law says what Rubio said. The International Maritime Organization states there is 'no legal basis' for mandatory tolls on the strait [3]. Under the law of the sea, Hormuz is a transit-passage strait, and its shipping lanes run through the territorial waters of Iran and Oman - not the United States [3]. A foreign ship's right to pass cannot be charged for, and a country with no coast on the strait has no waters there to tax from. The US has defended that principle for fifty years; it is the same principle that lets American ships cross the Panama and Suez Canals, and the reason Trump demanded free passage through both in 2025.
The scale is where 'reimbursed for costs' stops being a description and becomes a euphemism. Roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day - about a fifth of global consumption - and a fifth of the world's LNG move through Hormuz [3]. A 20 percent levy on all of that cargo is not the reimbursement of escort costs; it is a revenue stream measured in tens of billions of dollars a year, which would land in freight rates and, eventually, at the pump. Calling it 'fairness,' as the post does, does not change what the number is.
There is also the small matter of the guarding. A guardian implies something guarded, and the strait right now is not being kept open so much as avoided. Tanker traffic is at a five-week low; the handful of ships that crossed on Sunday did so with their transponders switched off; and despite the administration's signals, no US Navy escort or convoy mission has actually been launched [3]. Iran's military headquarters, for its part, said it 'will not, under any circumstances, allow the United States to interfere in the management of the Strait of Hormuz' [3]. Oman, the strait's other coastal state and an active mediator, has its own draft proposal for managing traffic. Nobody has agreed to a US-run, US-taxed strait.
Strip away the capital letters and the claim is this: the US will take ownership of an international waterway it has no coast on, run it, and charge the world 20 percent to use it. The reason that cannot happen is not an argument this newsroom is making. It is the argument the Secretary of State made, on the record, eighteen days ago, about the very same toll [2][3].
