President Donald Trump said Monday that the United States would likely take over control of the Strait of Hormuz and expects to be compensated for guarding the vital oil shipping route, as Washington and Tehran continued to assert competing claims over the waterway following a fresh weekend exchange of strikes.

"We're going to keep the strait, and we'll probably run it," Trump said in a phone interview on Fox News' "Fox & Friends." "We'll become the guardian of the strait. Maybe we'll call it the guardian angel of the strait. And we should be reimbursed for that." Trump argued the arrangement would mark a departure from decades of unpaid U.S. involvement in securing the corridor. "We guarded the strait for 50 years, and we never got paid for it," he said. "We guarded it for nothing."

Trump indicated he expected other nations benefiting from secured passage through the strait to help cover the cost. "When we do that we're going to be reimbursed because the other nations are very wealthy, they're on our side, and we can't be expected to do that for nothing unlike we had for many years," he said, adding later in the interview, "We're going to guard it. We're going to get paid for guarding it — a lot of money." Trump did not detail a specific reimbursement mechanism or figure during the interview, and the White House had not released formal policy details on how any such payment structure would work as of Monday.

The comments came amid a sharp escalation in fighting between the U.S. and Iran over the weekend that has thrown into serious doubt an interim agreement signed last month, under which the two sides........

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