Analysis — how a war over two waterways quietly turned into an argument about who may charge for them, and why the exemptions matter more than the fees.
Three tolls in one month
On 13 July, President Trump declared that the United States would be reimbursed "at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped" through the Strait of Hormuz, styling America the "Guardian of the Hormuz Strait." He dropped the idea a day later, after shipowner backlash — and against the backdrop of a non-binding decision the IMO Council had adopted on 10 July which, though aimed at Iran, called on states not to recognise measures that close, obstruct, hamper or otherwise interfere with the right of transit passage. An instrument drafted against Tehran was turned within days on Washington.
On 29 July, a senior Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran had ruled out Oman's wider proposal for joint regional management of Hormuz — a scheme under which shippers would have made voluntary contributions funding navigation, environmental protection and search-and-rescue, modelled loosely on cooperation around the Malacca Strait. Iran's position, the official said, is that Iran and Oman should manage their respective areas without other powers taking part. Note what was refused: the shared management, not the principle of charging. Tehran continues to assert a right to impose fees in some form of its own.
And on the same day, regional sources told Reuters that Yemen's Houthis are considering imposing fees on most traffic through Bab el-Mandeb, a week after declaring a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia. No timeframe has been set. An Arab regional official told Reuters that Houthi officials returning from Tehran were accompanied by Iranian advisers who were there to guide them on setting up a potential authority to regulate such charges.
Three proposals, three actors — a superpower, a regional-management framework, and an armed movement — aimed at the same two stretches of water inside four weeks. One was withdrawn, one was refused, one is being drafted.
That convergence is the story. The war over these corridors is becoming an argument about who has the right to charge for them.
The difference between extortion and a toll
It is tempting to file the Houthi plan under piracy. That misreads it, and the misreading matters.
Extortion is episodic, opaque and personal: pay this, to this person, or your ship is at risk. A toll is something else — it requires an authority, a published schedule, some predictability, and, above all, a rule about who does not pay. The reported plan has all four features in embryo, including an authority being stood up with outside advice.
The tell is the exemption. Reuters' sources say the proposed charges would exempt Chinese ships. Separately — and on stronger sourcing — six sources told Reuters that Beijing has been negotiating directly with the Houthis over guaranteed safe passage for Chinese tankers, with at least four China-bound vessels crossing Bab el-Mandeb since the restrictions were announced and Chinese officials reportedly clearing ships individually. Beijing's foreign ministry has not publicly confirmed those talks. China is the world's largest buyer of Saudi crude.
An exemption is not a criminal instinct. It is a foreign policy. Pirates do not run loyalty schemes. Once you decide who is exempt, you are no longer robbing traffic — you are governing it, and selecting your friends. The objectives described by Reuters' sources — these are source-attributed motives, not declared Houthi policy — make the same point: to normalise the practice of charging for passage through international waterways, and to increase pressure on the United States. That is not a revenue plan. It is a claim to jurisdiction.
Which is precisely what makes it more serious than a raid.
The principle points one way. Nothing enforces it.
There is a real legal distinction underneath all this. Artificial canals and natural international straits operate under fundamentally different legal regimes. Suez and Panama are infrastructure, dug and operated by a canal authority that charges for its use. Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are natural waterways governed by the law of transit passage, where the operative question is not what a passage costs but whether it can be impeded at all.
That is the principle the IMO Council reached for on 10 July, when it condemned Iran's creation of an entity purporting to control traffic through the Strait and called on member states not to recognise Tehran's sovereignty claim or measures interfering with transit passage. It cut against Washington's fee three days later just as squarely, and it would cut against the Houthis now.
Two things blunt it. The decision is non-binding — the IMO Council is a governing body, not a court. And Iran is not a party to UNCLOS, a point Tehran made at the IMO itself, arguing it is not bound by the treaty regime. That does not dispose of the customary-law question, but it does mean the dispute cannot be settled simply by citing the convention.
And then there is the enforcement gap, which is the reason none of it may settle anything. Western diplomats told Reuters that a toll regime would face strong Gulf and European opposition — while noting that international naval forces are already overstretched and unable to provide sufficient protection for merchant shipping, with little political appetite to change that.
A rule that no one will enforce is not a rule. It is a norm. And norms about who may charge for the sea have historically eroded the moment someone charged and was paid.
There is precedent alleged, though not proven. A 2024 UN Panel of Experts report on Yemen recorded source estimates that Houthi safe-passage payments during the height of that year's campaign may have reached roughly $180 million a month — while explicitly stating that the Panel could not independently verify the information. Unverified, and so not evidence of a functioning system. But it is evidence that the market has already discovered what it will pay when protection is unavailable.
The exemption is the hinge
If a toll takes hold, its most consequential feature will not be the price. It will be the split it creates.
We have already documented the asymmetry it would formalise: tankers linked to China and Russia continuing to cross Bab el-Mandeb, some carrying Saudi crude, while Western owners increasingly avoid the passage, reroute, or transit dark. Adnoc is now moving LNG through Hormuz with its position broadcasters switched off — satellite imagery confirms loadings at Das Island while nothing is transmitting nearby.
A fee regime with a China exemption would convert that informal asymmetry into a published one. It divides world shipping into three tiers: those who are exempt, those who pay, and those who go the long way round. Each tier pays a different price for the same cargo — one in influence, one in cash, one in twenty-five extra days at sea.
For Europe and Britain, this is the uncomfortable part. A route that is legally open and physically passable can still become commercially structured against you, without a single additional shot being fired.
Denmark charged for four centuries
The uncomfortable historical fact is that this has worked before, and for a very long time.
For more than four centuries, from around 1429 until 1857, Denmark charged the Sound Dues on shipping entering and leaving the Baltic through the Øresund — a natural strait, not a canal — and the revenue became a pillar of the Danish state. The dues disappeared not through unilateral abolition, a court or a naval action, but through negotiation: under the Treaty of Copenhagen of 14 March 1857, effective that April, the maritime powers effectively redeemed Denmark's toll rights with a one-off capital settlement, in return for which Denmark gave up the annual revenue and undertook to keep maintaining lighthouses, navigational marks and pilotage. The United States, not party to the main treaty, settled separately on 11 April 1857 for $393,011 "once and for all."
This is a historical precedent, not a legal one, and the distinction matters. When the dues began, the Danish crown controlled both shores of the Sound and its position was a recognised one; the Houthis hold one coastline and no recognition at all. Nothing about Denmark's case licenses theirs.
What it does show is how coercive control of a chokepoint becomes an institutionalised revenue claim — and how long such a claim can survive once established. The other difference is the one that matters commercially: Baltic trade had no plausible alternative route, whereas Bab el-Mandeb has one, the long way round Africa.
The lesson is not that a toll would be legitimate. It is that legitimacy is not what determines whether a toll gets paid. Convenience does. Denmark's dues survived four hundred years of protest because paying was cheaper than sailing round, and they ended when the powers found it cheaper still to buy them out.
From Yanbu to Asia, sailing south through Bab el-Mandeb takes about sixteen days; turning north through Suez and round southern Africa can stretch the voyage to about fifty. That gap is the whole business model.
Which is why the barrels are already moving north
The most revealing response to all of this is happening three thousand miles away, in ice.
Russia is pushing exports through the Northern Sea Route at scale. The conventional carrier Arctic Pioneer reached Arctic LNG 2 on 29 July, the first non-ice-class LNG vessel there this year, with the available fleet nearly doubled on last summer. At least seven crude tankers are staged for the eastbound season, capable of carrying roughly five million barrels — close to a third of everything Russia moved to Asia via the route across the entire 2025 season.
The stated logic is exactly the one this article is about: shorter voyages to Asia, and reduced exposure to the Black Sea, the Red Sea and Hormuz.
Set against our earlier work on correlated corridors, this is the inversion. Saudi Arabia's bypass — the pipeline west to Yanbu — failed the independence test, because the war that closed the primary route reached the alternative. Russia's Arctic corridor is the opposite: its risks are ice, season and sanction, none of which correlate with anything happening in the Gulf.
That is the second-order consequence of tolling a chokepoint. Charge for a passage and you do not merely raise costs — you accelerate the hunt for a passage nobody can charge for. Every fee proposal is an advertisement for the route that escapes it.
What would confirm this — and what would break it
It confirms if an authority is actually constituted and a published schedule of fees appears; if any owner or agency is credibly reported to have paid; or if a second actor copies the model on another waterway. Any of those turns a proposal into a precedent.
It breaks if the plan stays rhetorical — as Washington's 20% fee did within twenty-four hours — or if naval protection is genuinely restored, which would remove the vacuum the whole idea depends on. The American proposal collapsed under commercial and institutional pressure in a single day; it is entirely possible this one does too.
For now, the honest position is narrow. No fee has been imposed, no timeframe has been set, and the earlier payments in the record remain unverified. What has changed is that charging for passage has moved from an outlandish idea to one that three different actors have put on the table within a month — and that the party most likely to be exempt from the next one is the same party already exempt from the attacks.
The war has been about whether these waterways stay open. The next phase is about who owns the gate.
Update — 29 July 2026, later the same day
Three developments arrived after this piece was published, and all three sharpen it.
Iran's fee ambition is now explicit, not inferred. Reuters, reporting Tehran's rejection of the Omani plan, describes the Strait as a waterway "which Iran says it controls and where it aims to collect fees." The senior Iranian official called Oman's proposal unreasonable: a 50-50 arrangement would not serve Iran's interests, because Tehran wants sole control of the inbound route and partial control of the outbound one. That removes any ambiguity about what was refused. Iran did not reject the idea of charging for passage. It rejected sharing the revenue and the authority.
That makes four claims on the same two waterways in a month, not three — and it means every actor in this dispute now accepts the premise. What they disagree about is who holds the gate.
The industry has answered with private ordering. In its latest security advisory, INTERTANKO — the independent tanker owners' association — advises members to delay Hormuz transits where possible, coordinate with military reporting centres, run enhanced voyage risk assessments, review AIS and LRIT transmission policies in high-risk areas, and, explicitly, not to pay transit fees to either Iranian or Houthi authorities.
That last instruction is the most consequential sentence in this story so far. With navies overstretched and no binding legal remedy in prospect, the counter-measure to a toll is not enforcement but a collective refusal to pay — owners coordinating to deny the fee a market. It is the same mechanism that ended the Sound Dues, in reverse: instead of the maritime powers buying the toll out, they are attempting to price it at zero. Whether that holds depends on whether every owner behaves the same way, and the reported Chinese exemption is precisely the wedge that would break it.
And the escape route just widened again. PanStar Line has opened bookings for South Korea's first container voyage to Europe via the Northern Sea Route — a 2,800 TEU ship sailing from Busan on 22 August for Rotterdam, Hamburg and Gdansk, with transhipment enquiries arriving from Japan and China. Seoul is explicitly following Beijing in developing Arctic container services, and the stated reason is uncertainty over the Suez route caused by the Red Sea crisis.
Russia's crude and LNG going north was one data point. A South Korean box service booking European cargo for August is another, in a different trade entirely. The pattern in the closing argument above is holding faster than expected: every fee proposal is an advertisement for the route that escapes it.
EuroOilWatch / UKOilWatch / AmericasOilWatch track fuel reserves, prices and supply-route risk across Europe, Britain and the Americas. This piece is analysis, not a price forecast; confirmed facts are stated as confirmed and unverified reports are flagged as such.