Iran has announced a deal with Oman that would open a shipping lane through the Strait of Hormuz, and has taken care to say the deal is not peace. The route exists on paper, its coordinates agreed and a joint statement in its final drafting stage. What would make it real, Tehran insists, is still missing: the end of the American naval blockade.
The announcement came Wednesday from Esmaeil Baqaei, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, speaking through the state news agency IRNA. He said the two countries had settled on the geographical coordinates of a corridor through the strait for merchant shipping and were completing a joint statement on its terms. A deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, added that the route would be temporary, lasting two to four months. Iranian officials did not say whether a proposed fee on ships crossing the strait, a point of dispute with the United States, was part of the arrangement.
Baqaei then walked the deal back to its limits. He said the agreement alone would not make transit safe because of the naval blockade and other aggressive and threatening actions against Iran and its interests on the American side. In other words: the lane is agreed, but the war is not over.
The strait is the world’s most important energy choke point, carrying about a fifth of the oil and liquefied natural gas that moves by sea. Since the American and Israeli strikes on Iran at the end of February, Tehran has largely shut it. Every vessel now needs Iranian pre-clearance to pass, and ships that have skipped the formality have been attacked. Traffic has collapsed from roughly 130 ships a day before the war to fewer than ten. The blockade is now part of the landscape, enforced by Iran on the strait and by the United States on Iranian ports, with the Houthis running a separate blockade of Saudi ports in the Red Sea since late July.
The collapse has done what blockades always do: pushed prices up and shortages outward. Brent crude has at points climbed above $90 a barrel, and governments from Europe to Asia to Africa have introduced fuel rationing and energy-saving rules.
This is not the first attempt to reopen the waterway. In June, Iran and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding under which the two sides would stop shooting, reopen the strait and end the war within sixty days. It fell apart within days, and the tit-for-tat attacks resumed. The memory of that failure hangs over every new arrangement.
The United States has not commented on the Oman deal. President Trump warned Tuesday that Iran would be hit very hard if the strait stayed shut, while senior American officials have said talks have progressed far enough that shipments could resume as early as this week. Tehran repeats that it is not talking to Washington and says it will not start.
Read plainly, the Oman agreement is a modest piece of seamanship in a war that is not ending. A lane through a blocked strait, open for a few months, agreed with a neighbor, kept separate from the American question. Oman, which shares the waterway with Iran, gets some traffic moving again and a role in managing the crisis. Tehran gets a demonstration that it can open the strait on its own terms, without bargaining with Washington.
The question is whether the lane survives contact with the blockade. An agreement between Iran and Oman can mark a route on a chart. It cannot move the warships enforcing the blockade, and until they are gone, a safe lane through Hormuz is a piece of paper in a shooting gallery.