Strait of Hormuz becomes central fault line in US-Iran conflict: Despite the original focus on Iran’s nuclear program, the waterway has emerged as the main battleground, with both sides using closure, strikes, and proposed tolls as leverage, threatening global oil supplies. 

Flawed June MOU deferred key issues: The agreement’s ambiguous language on strait administration allowed Iran to maintain influence and led to renewed escalation, as both sides interpret commitments differently and use the strait as a bargaining chip. 

Need for genuine international framework: The author argues for decoupling the strait’s status from bilateral disputes through formalized international oversight (including Oman’s role), adherence to maritime law, and enforcement mechanisms to prevent unilateral control or tolls by either side.

More than four months after Israel and the US launched their war against Iran and nearly a month after Donald Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding meant to end it, the Strait of Hormuz — not the nuclear file that supposedly justified the conflict in the first place — has become the fault line on which the entire ceasefire now teeters.There is a bitter irony buried in that fact. When the war began in late February, the strait was open. Tankers moved, oil flowed and the world’s most important chokepoint for seaborne crude functioned largely as it always had, even as strikes fell elsewhere in Iran. But now, with the ceasefire collapsing, the Strait of Hormuz is once more shuttered.That paradox says a great deal about how this ceasefire was constructed and why it is now unraveling in the waters of the Gulf rather than over Iran’s enrichment levels or centrifuge counts. The memorandum, signed on June 17, was supposed to end the war and lift the blockades that had periodically choked the strait since late February. It did neither in any durable sense.Buried in its text was a clause that read as reasonable in the signing room but proved combustible in practice: Iran would “make arrangements” for the safe passage of commercial vessels and would engage with Oman “to define the future administration” of the waterway. That is not settling the controversy. It is a convenient way to avoid........

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