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President Trump, asked about Iran's new practice of charging oil tankers to transit the Strait of Hormuz, suggested the United States might enter into a "joint venture" with Tehran to collect the tolls. "It's a way of securing it," he explained, "also securing it from lots of other people. It's a beautiful thing."

For roughly four hundred years, the entire project of what we now call the liberal international order included, at its core, the abolition of tolls at maritime chokepoints. The Danish Sound Dues, bought out in 1857. The Rhine castles, legislated away. The Ottoman customs at the Dardanelles, negotiated and finally treatied out of existence. The Freedom of Navigation program the U.S. Navy has been running since the Carter administration exists for one reason: to prevent any coastal state from turning a strait into a tollbooth. And the American position has always been that Articles 37 through 44 of UNCLOS—the transit passage regime—are binding customary international law, so binding that we've never bothered to ratify the treaty, because what are you going to do, sue us?

It was hypocrisy, sure, but it was productive hypocrisy. It kept the seas open. And now, in approximately six weeks, Trump has managed to set that four-hundred-year project on fire.

Let's back up. On February 28, 2026, Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint U.S.-Israeli surprise attack on Iran during nuclear negotiations (pretextual, and necessitated by Trump's own ripping up of the JCPOA in 2018). Nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours. A decapitation strike killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with Iran's defense minister and the head of the IRGC. The same opening salvo, via a target list that the IDF has since quietly acknowledged relied on months of "strategic and operational deception" of satellite imagery, struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab at 07:15 UTC, killing 168 schoolgirls and their teachers. Iran's negotiating delegation in Islamabad now calls itself "Minab 168." Remember that name.

The administration's stated reasons for the war vague, ever-shifting, and at times contradictory. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it a "holy war." Trump variously claimed it was to prevent an imminent Iranian nuclear threat — the DIA's own assessment had put Iran's long-range missile capability at 2035 — to stop an expected Iranian retaliation against Israel, to seize Iran's oil, to achieve regime change, and, my personal favorite, because "God is good, and God wants to see people taken care of." Senator Mark Warner, after an intelligence briefing, counted the justifications and found "now four reasons given for why this war was started."

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — a retired Green Beret with eleven combat deployments whose first wife was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria, so hardly a pacifist — resigned on March 17 with a letter stating flatly that "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby." Let's be clear: Donald Trump is a big boy and his administrative (along with every Republican) deserves full blame for their own decisions. But it's notable that Kent, who presumably had access to the genuine intel, called the intelligence case "a lie."

The most obvious first question is what the war has accomplished, and the indisputable answer is that the United States is much worse off than it was before the war. We can claim damage: Iran lost 19 naval vessels, an entire submarine (the first sunk in combat since the Falklands), and by its own Health Ministry's count at least 2,076 people killed and 26,500 injured, including 1,621 children. Three million Iranians are internally displaced. The Trump administration has struck over 10,000 targets and fired roughly 850 of its 3,500 Tomahawk cruise missiles — a quarter of the entire stockpile — in the first month alone. But, 43 days in, Iran is still launching missiles, still holding the Strait of Hormuz, and is now, for the first time in modern history, charging ships to transit an international strait. The damage inflicted to Iran is trivial to the damage the Trump administration allowed Iran to inflict on us and the world order that has benefitted us so greatly.

Consider the sequence. On March 3, Trump declared that Iran had "no navy, air force, air detection, or radar," and that "just about everything's been knocked out." On March 9: "The war is very complete, pretty much." On March 6: "There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!" On April 1: "We are blasting Iran into oblivion… back to the Stone Ages!" And then, on April 7, hours after illegally threatening genocide with "a whole civilization will die tonight," Trump accepted a ceasefire brokered by Pakistan — Pakistan, the nation which until recently we treated as barely a sovereign state — on terms that included Iran's ten-point plan, the lifting of sanctions, nuclear enrichment rights, and, yes, Iran's continued control over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump then posted to Truth Social: "Total and complete victory. 100 percent. No question about it."

Which brings us to the tolls. Since mid-March, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been running what Lloyd's List accurately describes as a "toll booth" operation at the Strait of Hormuz. Ships are rerouted through a narrow IRGC-controlled corridor near Larak Island, in Iranian territorial waters, under armed escort. They are charged roughly one dollar per barrel — about two million dollars for a fully loaded VLCC — payable in Chinese yuan through Kunlun Bank, or (and I promise I'm not making this up) in Bitcoin and USDT stablecoins, deliberately routed outside the SWIFT system so the U.S. Treasury can't touch it. TRM Labs notes this is the first time a state has used cryptocurrency infrastructure as a sovereign revenue mechanism at a major chokepoint. The Iranian parliament formalized all of this on March 30 with a law called the "Strait of Hormuz Management Plan." A five-tier nationality ranking governs who gets through: China, Russia, India, Iraq, and Pakistan go first; U.S. and Israel-linked vessels are denied entirely; everyone else pays and waits.

The revenue runs to roughly twenty million dollars a day, comparable to Egypt's Suez Canal revenues. Iranian lawmaker Alaeddin Boroujerdi, with admirable candor, explained the rationale: "Now, because war has costs, naturally we must do this and take transit fees from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz." What are we supposed to say to that? He's right as a practical matter, and quite obviously Iran has the power to enforce it. But the damage to international trade, and the whole globalized world order America spent decades building to benefit itself, goes deep.

Article 44 of the UNCLOS Convention states that "there shall be no suspension of transit passage." Article 26 says "no charge may be levied upon foreign ships by reason only of their passage." James Kraska at the Naval War College called the tolls, "a violation of the rules of transit passage." Over a hundred international law professors have written an open letter saying the strikes themselves violated the UN Charter. The European Commission, on April 9, stated that the strait "is a public good for all humanity." Donald Rothwell at ANU warned the tolls "could set a precedent that tempts other nations bordering critical waterways around the world to follow suit." A French maritime lawyer named Julien Raynaut went further: an Iranian tollbooth "could lead China to conclude that it could restrict movement in the Taiwan Strait." And Philippe Delebecque at the Sorbonne said what everyone else was thinking: "If Hormuz could be closed, why not Gibraltar or Malacca? That would be the end of an international society."

They're all right, but that horse already left the barn. The United States, the only nation with the naval tonnage and the historical claim to be the enforcer of the transit passage regime, has just spent six weeks proving it cannot enforce anything. Iran's Tanker War capabilities in the 1980s never managed to disrupt more than two percent of Gulf traffic; Operation Earnest Will kept the oil flowing. In 2026, with a vastly more capable U.S. Navy, traffic through the strait has dropped to single digits. Six hundred vessels, including 325 tankers and roughly twenty thousand mariners, are stranded in the Gulf. The International Energy Agency calls it "the greatest global energy security challenge in history." Brent crude hit an intraday peak of $165.65 a barrel. War risk insurance premiums, which used to run two hundredths of a percent of hull value, hit two and a half percent per seven-day period — and for U.S.-nexus ships, five percent. David Smith at McGill & Partners said the quiet part out loud: "If you went to the hull market right now and said: 'I've got a tanker going through the Strait of Hormuz,' I think there is a possibility that you would struggle to find underwriters." The global insurance market, in other words, has rendered its verdict on American naval supremacy, and it is not pricing in victory.

Just to drive the nail in the coffin, Trump proposed — in earnest, on camera — a "joint venture" with the Islamic Republic to collect the tolls he had just spent forty days of strike operations trying to prevent. "I'd rather do that than let them have them," he explained. "We're the winner." And then, twenty-four hours later, after someone in the building presumably explained to him what UNCLOS is and why the Fifth Fleet exists, he reversed himself on Truth Social: "There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait — They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!" Empty words from the commander-in-chief of the nation whose entire post-1945 strategic identity and economic power has been built on the proposition that the ocean is free, both of which were just frittered away for reasons that still can't be articulated in retrospect.

I would end the post there, but the historical parallel is too important to leave alone. In November 1956, the British and French, in collusion with Israel, invaded Egypt to seize the Suez Canal from Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was, in raw military terms, a tactical success. In every other way that mattered — diplomatically, economically, psychologically — it was the death of the British Empire. Nasser snatched victory from defeat by sinking ships in the canal and forcing the humiliation of Eden's withdrawal. The historian Alfred McCoy, writing in The Nation last month, calls this "micro-militarism" — the desperate little war launched by a fading power to recover its imperial glory, which instead accelerates the decline it was meant to reverse. Middle East Eye put it more plainly: "Empires decline when their military reach outpaces their political strategy."

The United States has spent six weeks bombing Iran and has, in the process, proven it cannot guarantee the one thing it has always promised the world it would guarantee: that a ship can move from ocean to ocean without paying tribute to a local warlord. Trump told the New York Times in January that he didn't need international law — that the only thing that could stop him was "my own morality. My own mind." It turns out that wasn't enough. It turns out Iran's morality had a vote. It turns out Iran's mines had a vote. It turns out the global insurance market had a vote, and it voted no.

The tollbooth at Hormuz is not just a revenue mechanism for a battered theocracy. It is a chapter ending in a global history book, the part where the American century ends.

A beautiful thing, the man said.