Freedom of navigation – Asia Pacific Report https://asiapacificreport.nz Independent Asia Pacific news and analysis Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:03:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Lim Tean: You cannot bomb a strait open – Hormuz, Chabahar and the coming battle for Bab el-Mandeb https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/20/lim-tean-you-cannot-bomb-a-strait-open-hormuz-chabahar-and-the-coming-battle-for-bab-el-mandeb/ Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:03:19 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130859 COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean

Strip away the communiqués about the embattled Strait of Hormuz and look at the data, because in maritime commerce the data never lies.

Before the war began in late February, roughly 130 vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz every day. It is the aorta of the global energy system — a fifth of the world’s oil, a third of its seaborne LNG.

Then came the American campaign, announced in March with a simple promise: bombing would reopen the strait.

The verdict of the tankers
Consider what four months of that promise has produced. Over the three days of July 10–12, a total of 73 vessels crossed– fewer than 25 a day.

On July 12, the day CENTCOM completed its fourth strike wave in a single week, transits collapsed to 11. By last Thursday and Friday, shipping data showed just three commodity vessels crossing in 24 hours, with not a single VLCC or LNG carrier transiting for two consecutive days.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence reports that no vessel above 10,000 deadweight tonnes has used the Oman-side “Southern Highway” — the very corridor the Americans coordinate and champion — with its transponder on since July 7.

Read that sequence again. More bombs, fewer ships. Every single escalation wave since March has deepened the shutdown. The strikes are not failing to achieve their objective. They are producing its opposite — measurably, in Kpler and Lloyd’s List data, week after week.

The tanker market has voted with its keels.

Chabahar and the CENTCOM confession
Last week the campaign reached Chabahar, where American forces destroyed the maritime control tower at the Shahid Kalantari port. The stated rationale: the tower was an IRGC surveillance node, and its destruction “protects freedom of navigation”.

Examine that claim on the map before you examine it in law. Chabahar sits on the Gulf of Oman — outside the Strait of Hormuz entirely. It is Iran’s only deep-water port with direct access to the Indian Ocean, the one Iranian harbour whose traffic never touches Hormuz at all.

It is also the port India has spent a decade and hundreds of millions developing as its corridor to Afghanistan and the North-South Transport Corridor. Striking it does nothing to reopen Hormuz. It does, however, tell New Delhi exactly how much its equities weigh in Washington’s calculus.

And a port’s traffic control tower is the classic dual-use facility. Whatever surveillance function it may have served, it is also the instrument that sequences civilian shipping safely in and out of a harbour.

Destroying it does not enhance safe navigation in those waters; it degrades it. Iranian maritime domain awareness, meanwhile, rests on coastal radar, drones, dhows and AIS itself. One tower blinds no one.

But the deepest problem is in CENTCOM’s own language. The strike, we are told, protects freedom of navigation “for all vessels, except for ships attempting to violate the ongoing US naval blockade against Iran.”

I have practised in the law of the sea for more than 35 years, and I can tell you that sentence is a confession. Freedom of navigation under UNCLOS is not selective. It cannot be granted to some flags and withdrawn from others at the discretion of one navy.

A blockade is not the protection of free navigation — it is its suspension. What the United States is defending in Hormuz is not the principle of open seas. It is a claim to decide who sails. That is not freedom of navigation. That is contested control, dressed in the vocabulary of the thing it replaced.

This is the Legitimacy Principle in its purest form: a rule becomes real only at the point of enforcement. Washington says the strait is open. The point of enforcement is the strait itself — and at the point of enforcement, three ships crossed in a day.

What the underwriters know
Here is what no CENTCOM statement will ever change, and it is the lesson of a career spent in war risk and P&I.

Straits are not opened by admirals. They are opened by underwriters.

A shipowner does not ask whether the US Navy has declared a corridor safe. He asks what his war risk premium is, whether his P&I cover survives the transit, whether his crew will sail, and whether his charterer will pay.

War risk premiums respond to kinetic activity in the area — full stop. It does not matter whose ordnance is falling or whose infrastructure is burning. Every strike, on either side’s assets, keeps the Strait of Hormuz uninsurable at commercial rates. And an uninsurable strait is a closed strait, whatever the press releases say.

This is why the bombing cannot work even on its own terms. The campaign’s theory is that destroying Iranian capabilities restores confidence. But the underwriter does not price Iranian capabilities. The pricing is based on violence — and the campaign itself is the violence.

The second chokepoint
And now the war has done what escalation always does: it has multiplied the battlefield.

On July 16, Reuters reported — from three sources — that Iran has instructed the Houthis to stand ready to close Bab el-Mandeb if the United States strikes Iranian power infrastructure, as Trump threatened on July 14.

A source close to the Houthis says the missiles and drones are already deployed in the highlands overlooking Hodeidah and the Gulf of Aden, awaiting the order. And the trigger is not in Sana’a: IRGC representatives already inside Yemen will decide when the gate closes.

Understand what this means. Bab el-Mandeb — the “Gate of Tears” — carries 10 to 15 percent of global maritime trade and a significant share of Europe’s energy imports. Since Hormuz shut, the Red Sea route has been precisely the alternative on which Gulf exporters and the entire architecture of workarounds has depended.

Close it, and the Middle East’s two great oil gates are shut simultaneously. Every laden vessel between Asia and Europe rounds the Cape of Good Hope, adding two to three weeks and rewriting freight economics overnight. South African ports are already running heavy.

The Americans set out to open one chokepoint by force. They are on the verge of closing two.

The loaded gun
Let me be rigorous rather than merely alarmed, because the counter-argument deserves its hearing.

There is a serious school of thought — well argued this month by Yemeni analysts — that Tehran will never actually pull this trigger. A proxy’s value lies in the threat, not the execution.

The Houthis’ leverage over Hodeidah, Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea terminals, the risk of dragging Egypt and the Gulf states into open confrontation: three concentric circles of deterrence all counsel restraint. The loaded gun on the table, in this view, is worth more than the fired one.

In a stable environment, I would agree. But this is not a stable environment. It is an escalation spiral in which each side has repeatedly done the thing the analysts said was too costly to do. Iran was not supposed to close Hormuz. The United States was not supposed to blockade a nation of ninety million people. Chabahar was not supposed to be struck. The power grid was not supposed to be threatened.

Deterrence logic assumes rational actors husbanding their leverage — but four months of this war have shown both capitals converting leverage into rubble at every juncture. The gun stays holstered only until someone’s escalation makes the holster untenable. Trump’s power-grid ultimatum may be exactly that.

The reckoning
Machiavelli warned that wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please. Washington began this campaign believing that firepower could substitute for the one thing that actually opens sea lanes: the confidence of the men and women who insure, crew and charter the world’s ships.

Four months on, the strait is emptier than ever, a second chokepoint is mined with intent, and the phrase “freedom of navigation” has been bent into its own negation — freedom for all vessels, except.

The rule is only real at the point of enforcement. At the point of enforcement, the sea is empty.

You cannot bomb a strait open. You can only bomb it shut.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

]]> The toll-keeper of Hormuz – how the US just buried its own ‘freedom of seas’ doctrine https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/15/the-toll-keeper-of-hormuz-how-the-us-just-buried-its-own-freedom-of-seas-doctrine/ Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:17:46 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130661 COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean

The most important response to Trump’s Hormuz announcement did not come from Beijing, Brussels or the United Nations. It came from Tehran, and it was four words long. “POTUS is absolutely right.”

That was Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, replying to the President’s declaration that the United States would henceforth be “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT” and would be “reimbursed” at the rate of 20 percent on all cargo transiting the waterway. Araghchi agreed that whoever secured the Strait deserved compensation — adding only that Iran had always been its “true guardian”, and that 20 percent was too much.

Iran, he said, “will be fair.”

Understand what just happened. The two states now fighting for control of the world’s most important oil artery are no longer arguing about whether ships must pay tribute to pass. They are haggling over the rate.

For 75 years, the entire edifice of the “freedom of the seas” rested on the opposite principle. Yesterday, its chief architect demolished it in a single post.

What the law actually says
I practised shipping law for more than three decades, and I want readers to grasp how radical this announcement is in legal terms.

The regime governing straits like Hormuz is called transit passage, codified in Part III of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Its roots go back further, to the International Court of Justice’s very first case — Corfu Channel (1949) — where the court held that warships and merchant vessels alike enjoyed a right of passage through international straits that coastal states may not obstruct in peacetime.

Two pillars hold up this regime:

First, transit passage cannot be suspended. Not by the coastal state, not by anyone. Article 44 of UNCLOS is explicit.

Second — and this is the provision every reader should remember — passage cannot be taxed. Article 26 permits charges upon foreign ships only for specific services rendered to that ship, such as pilotage or towage. A general levy for the privilege of passing is flatly prohibited.

Even for coastal states.

Now consider the American position. The United States has no coastline on the Strait of Hormuz. It is not even a party to UNCLOS — for four decades Washington has insisted that transit passage binds Iran as customary international law, enforced by the US Navy on behalf of all nations.

Oman and Iran, the actual littoral states, could not lawfully charge a single dollar for mere passage. The United States has now proposed to charge 20 percent of cargo value — from 10,000 km away — as a matter of what the President calls “FAIRNESS.” (A laden VLCC carrying two million barrels of crude at today’s prices approaches US$30 million per transit).

That is not the enforcement of the international waterway doctrine. It is its replacement by tribute.

The trap Tehran sprang
Here is where Araghchi’s four words become lethal.

Customary international law — the only legal basis America has ever had in Hormuz, since it never ratified UNCLOS — is formed by two elements: the consistent practice of states, and the belief that such practice is legally required (opinio juris).

When Iran instituted its permit-and-fee regime for the Strait earlier this year, Washington’s legal position was simple: no state may condition or charge for transit passage. Iran’s regime was unlawful per se.

That position is now dead. Killed not by Iranian missiles, but by an American post. If the “guardian” of the Strait may lawfully charge 20 percent for security services, then a fortiori the coastal state — with genuine sovereignty over the waters in question — may charge for the same service.

Araghchi grasped this instantly. His reply conceded nothing and captured everything: you have adopted our legal theory; we now dispute only the price.

The United States has spent decades building the customary law of the sea through its own state practice. It is now dismantling that law by the same mechanism. Every future tribunal, every future crisis, every future power that wishes to tax a chokepoint — the Bosphorus, Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb, the Panama approaches — will cite July 2026 as the moment the precedent was set by Washington itself.

However, President Trump has since backed away from the 20 percent charge, confirming that he was changing the “maritime security fee into historic multi-billion-dollar investment”.

He combined military strength with economic leverage, “securing major investment commitments instead of collecting fees”.

A blockade without a war — the underwriter’s nightmare
There is a second legal absurdity buried in the announcement that only those of us from the maritime world will fully appreciate.

The President declared the reinstatement of “THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE” — stopping not only Iran’s ships but Iran’s customers. Blockade, in the law of naval warfare, is a belligerent right. It exists only in a state of armed conflict, it must be formally declared and notified, and it must be effective and impartial.

The San Remo Manual sets out these requirements precisely.

Yet Washington simultaneously insists it is not at war with Iran.

Consider the position of a shipowner, a P&I club, or a war risk underwriter today. A “blockade” that is not a blockade, imposed by a state that is not a belligerent, targeting “customers” of Iran — an undefined class that could sweep in any tanker that has ever lifted Iranian crude.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority has declared passage “currently unfeasible” and maintains that its own permit system is the sole lawful route through the Strait.

Two sovereigns. Two permitting regimes. One body of water. Every vessel in the Gulf now sails under competing assertions of authority, each of which the other deems an act of war.

War risk premiums do not price legal theory — they price uncertainty. And there has never been uncertainty like this.

The guardian and the protection racket
Readers of this page know my argument: the “rules-based international order” has not been destroyed by its challengers. It is being liquidated by its author — sold off, asset by asset, for cash.

The freedom of the seas was the crown jewel of that order. It was the one rule America enforced with genuine consistency, because it was the rule from which American power flowed. The Royal Navy built the doctrine in the 19th century; the US Navy inherited it in the 20th.

Its moral force rested on a single proposition: the guardian takes nothing for itself. The seas were policed disinterestedly, and that disinterest was the legitimacy.

“Guardian” is an old word. In the waters I have worked in for 30 years, everyone understands what it means when an armed party offers you “safety and security” in exchange for a percentage of your cargo. It is the oldest business model on the sea. We did not used to call its practitioners guardians.

The Strait of Hormuz will remain open or it will close; the ceasefire will be rebuilt or it will collapse. But the doctrine — the idea that the world’s waterways belong to the community of nations and may not be farmed for revenue — died this week.

Not because Iran closed the Strait. Because America opened a toll booth.

The rules were never the order. Power was the order. The rules were its receipts.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

]]> Lim Tean: The Hormuz bone – why Iran will not let go https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/07/08/lim-tean-the-hormuz-bone-why-iran-will-not-let-go/ Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:59:44 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=130340 COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean

Last night, America bombed Iran. Again.

Dozens of strikes — four to five times heavier than the last round — against radar sites, anti-ship missile batteries, and the Revolutionary Guard’s swarm boats. Explosions lit up Bandar Abbas, Sirik, and Qeshm Island.

And what will it change? Nothing.

Because the strikes were a response to something far more revealing: in the space of 24 hours, three tankers — a Qatari LNG carrier, a Saudi supertanker, and a third vessel hit by drone — were struck in the Strait of Hormuz.

Look at where they were hit. All three were transiting the southern corridor hugging the Omani coast — the route Washington has designated, patrolled, and blessed with the protection of the US Navy.

That is the whole story in one map. The Strait of Hormuz today is not one waterway. It is two rival corridors.

A northern route, designated by Tehran, where ships must register with Iran and sail under Iranian rules. And a southern route, sponsored by America, where the Gulf states send their oil under the shadow of the Fifth Fleet.

‘No American route’
Iran’s message this week could not be clearer: there is no American route through “their” strait.

Tehran did not even claim the attacks. It didn’t need to. State television simply noted that a vessel had “ignored warnings”. After the American bombs fell, Iran’s military declared it would deliver a “crushing response” and that the only safe passage through Hormuz “is one set by Iran”.

Understand what is actually being contested here. This is not about tankers. It is about governance. For 80 years, freedom of navigation in the Gulf has meant navigation on Washington’s terms.

Iran is now asserting something revolutionary: that the power which sits astride the strait — geographically, permanently, immovably — will write the rules of passage. Not the US Navy. Not the Joint Maritime Information Center in Bahrain.

And here is what Washington refuses to grasp: Iran has already priced in the bombs. It absorbed strikes 10 days ago. It absorbed heavier strikes last night. It will absorb the next round too.

Every strike costs America political capital, splits it further from European allies who have barred their bases from offensive operations, and pushes oil and bond yields higher. Every strike costs Iran some radar stations and speedboats — assets it regards as expendable ammunition in a war of endurance.

Iran is the dog that has the Hormuz bone between its teeth. You can beat the dog. You can bomb the dog. The dog will yelp, bleed — and bite down harder.

Not bargaining chip
For Tehran, control of Hormuz is not a bargaining chip. It is the last and greatest source of leverage it possesses, the one card through which the rising regional hegemon dictates the terms of 20 percent of the world’s energy.

The rules-based order said the strait belonged to everyone. The emerging order says the strait belongs to those with the legitimacy — and the will — to hold it. Iran is betting it can outlast American patience.

History suggests the dog usually keeps the bone.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

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