Foreign & Public Diplomacy

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at the current status of the Strait of Hormuz, the reauthorization of a controversial U.S. surveillance tool, and calls for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign.

Open … With Conditions?

One of the world’s busiest shipping lanes is supposedly back in business. For weeks, Iranian forces have effectively stopped all traffic in the Strait of Hormuz—through which one-fifth of the world’s oil normally transits—in response to U.S. and Israeli strikes. The resulting chaos has sparked an unprecedented global energy crisis that raised crude costs and upended financial markets.

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at the current status of the Strait of Hormuz, the reauthorization of a controversial U.S. surveillance tool, and calls for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign.

Open … With Conditions?

One of the world’s busiest shipping lanes is supposedly back in business. For weeks, Iranian forces have effectively stopped all traffic in the Strait of Hormuz—through which one-fifth of the world’s oil normally transits—in response to U.S. and Israeli strikes. The resulting chaos has sparked an unprecedented global energy crisis that raised crude costs and upended financial markets.

On Friday, though, the United States and Iran both announced that the strategic thoroughfare had been reopened. “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” U.S. President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!”

Iran said the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” to commercial vessels in line with the Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire in Lebanon, which went into effect at midnight on Friday. However, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on X that the waterway would be open “for the remaining period of ceasefire”—not indefinitely. He did not specify whether this cease-fire is the 10-day Israel-Hezbollah truce or the U.S.-Iran deal, which is scheduled to end on April 21.

Trump, for his part, stressed in a separate post on Friday that Hormuz’s reopening was “not tied, in any way, to Lebanon.”

Further confusion emerged when Trump wrote that the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports in the strait would remain in........

© Foreign Policy