President Donald Trump said Friday that he intends to declare the Strait of Hormuz a "territory of the United States" once the war between the United States and Iran concludes, an assertion legal scholars immediately called unenforceable under international law and one Tehran dismissed outright.
"After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon I'll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States," Trump told a rally crowd in New York, according to multiple accounts of the remarks. Of the naval blockade the U.S. and Israel have enforced against Iranian shipping since the war began, Trump said: "The blockade is unstoppable. It's a wall of steel." He described the plan to claim the strait as "a great service for the world."
The remarks are Trump's own assertion, not a policy that has been formally announced or one for which the administration has laid out any legal mechanism; no nation has previously annexed an international waterway running through another country's territorial waters, and the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow channel between Iran and Oman through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil normally passes — lies partly within Iranian and Omani territorial seas under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Iran rejects the claim
Iran's response was swift. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said the strait "cannot be taken over by a tweet, nor by an aircraft carrier, nor by issuing a decree, nor by an election speech," adding that "Iran is neither afraid of threats nor intimidated by a show of force." Fighting between the United States, Israel and Iran has continued on and off since February 28, when U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began; a ceasefire memorandum signed in June, which required Iran to guarantee safe commercial passage through the strait, broke down within weeks as both sides accused each other of violations.
Iran has kept the strait effectively closed to normal commercial traffic since fighting resumed in early July, despite Trump's repeated claims that it is open or under U.S. control. Regional oil exports have fallen sharply as a result, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday that Washington would unveil new economic measures against Iran "in the coming days" that he described as unlike anything imposed before.
Stockpiles draining as talks stall
The economic stakes of the standoff have grown more acute. The International Energy Agency warned this week that global oil stockpiles are being depleted rapidly, projecting a third-quarter supply deficit of 1.8 million barrels a day — more than double its forecast just a month earlier — as buffer reserves that had cushioned the market since the war began are drawn down. U.S. crude stockpiles have fallen below 300 million barrels, their lowest level in more than four decades, according to the agency's tracking.
No agreement to reopen the strait has emerged from the diplomatic impasse between Washington and Tehran, now well into its sixth month. Trump's declaration on Friday added a new, legally fraught claim to a conflict where the basic question — how and when Hormuz reopens to normal shipping — remains unresolved.
