Iran has reopened and then reclosed the Strait of Hormuz to commercial vessels, creating ongoing confusion about access to the crucial waterway.
The institution designed to prevent this was the principle of international treaty obligation and the established norms of maritime transit. It failed because the authority to regulate the waterway is being exercised not through a stable, predictable legal framework, but through the arbitrary whim of an executive power that views the closure of a strait as a lever of political will. The question is not whether the decision to reclose the Strait of Hormuz was motivated by grievance or strategy, but whether any international mechanism exists that can compel a sovereign power to respect the permanence of a passage once it has been declared open.
When we examine the distribution of power in this crisis, we see a profound concentration of authority. In the governance of the Strait, the executive function of the Iranian state has been permitted to merge with the judicial determination of what constitutes a violation of maritime law. There is no independent arbiter to adjudable the “accusations” cited by Tehran; there is only the unilateral decree of the state. When the power to define a transgression and the power to execute a penalty - in this case, the physical obstruction of commerce - reside in the same hand, the concept of a “rule of law” evaporates, replaced by the rule of impulse.
In England, the stability of commerce has historically relied upon the separation of the Crown’s prerogative from the established customs of the sea and the oversight of Parliament. The monarch might command a fleet, but the laws governing the movement of goods are subject to a legislative process that provides a degree of predictability to the merchant class. The merchant does not fear the sudden change of a law, for the law is a public and enduring thing. In the current situation in the Strait of Hormuz, we see the opposite: a “law” that fluctuates with the tides of diplomatic tension, appearing and disappearing with the same irregularity as the fog in the Persian Gulf.
We might look to the Roman experience with the control of vital trade routes to understand the danger of such volatility. The Roman Republic understood that the security of the grain supply was not merely a matter of naval strength, but of institutional stability. When the control of essential resources becomes a tool of factional politics rather than a function of settled administration, the very foundations of the state’s economy are placed in jeopardy. The current confusion in the Strait - the opening and subsequent reclosing - is a symptom of a system where the executive uses the disruption of global supply chains as a substitute for institutional negotiation.
The check that is currently under the greatest pressure is the mechanism of international maritime law, specifically the principle of “innocent passage.” This check exists on paper, yet it is being rendered hollow in practice. A check that can be ignored without consequence is no longer a check; it is merely a suggestion. When a state can unilaterally suspend a fundamental norm of international transit to signal displeasure, and when the international community lacks a functional judicial body to enforce the continuity of that passage, the norm has ceased to function as a constraint. It has become a decorative element of diplomacy, easily swept aside by the winds of local political necessity.
The structural diagnosis is clear: the balance is profoundly unsound. We are witnessing the erosion of a predictable maritime order by the rise of an unpredictable executive will. The danger is not merely the temporary disruption of oil tankers or the fluctuation of energy markets; the danger is the precedent of successful volatility. If the closure of a global chokepoint can be used as a tool of intermittent coercion without triggering a structural response that restores the permanence of the law, then the “spirit” of international commerce will inevitably shift toward a more fragmented and defensive posture.
The fundamental principle at stake is the necessity of predictability in the exercise of power. Laws and customs must be stable enough to allow for the calculation of risk. When the executive power can manipulate the very geography of trade through sudden, unreviewable decrees, it destroys the trust upon which all long-term commerce is built. We are left with a system that does not govern through the permanence of rules, but through the management of crises - a state of affairs that is the very definition of a breakdown in the constitutional order of nations.