The USA spent the week guiding commercial tankers onto a route through the Strait of Hormuz that Iran had publicly and repeatedly vowed to attack, and on Tuesday, when Iran did exactly what it said it would, three vessels were struck off the coast of Oman and Washington tore up the Iranian oil waiver within hours. The sequence is not in dispute. What it reveals is a regime that steered ships it does not own, through water it has no right to assign, into fire it knew was coming.
The route in question, along the coast of Oman, was never agreed. The Joint Maritime Information Center, a body overseen by the U.S. Navy, announced the widened Omani lane and told shippers it was open and available, and that announcement is the whole of its authority. There is no bilateral instrument, no multilateral one, nothing Iran signed, in which this passage was sanctioned.
