Who Will Run the Strait of Hormuz Once Shipping Restarts?

The question hanging over the Strait of Hormuz is no longer whether shipping can resume, but who will operate, manage, and set the terms for the waterway once it does. That distinction between restoring a service and governing it has become the central fault line among Gulf states, and it surfaced sharply in mid-September when Saudi officials postponed a meeting with their Iranian counterparts that was set to take place in Salalah, Oman, to discuss reopening transit through the strait. Oman’s foreign minister said the meeting had been postponed “in the interest of consensus,” a phrase that reveals how much the operational stakes have risen. The focus of ongoing talks between Muscat and Tehran has shifted from managing wartime navigation to the future institutional governance of the strait itself.

The postponement reflected a lack of consensus among the Gulf Cooperation Council states over the growing stakes of the negotiations. Riyadh’s calculus became more complicated days later, when Yemen’s Houthis overran central government positions on the Red Sea and established a foothold overlooking the maritime chokepoint of Bab al-Mandab, further constraining Saudi export options. GCC states have long differed over how to engage Tehran, including during the past seven months of war, but the Salalah episode signaled that those differences had entered weightier territory, moving from navigating an emergency to potentially legitimizing a future order.

The political value of controlling a chokepoint is not synonymous with the ability to deny access. It rests in the possibility of turning restored access into a negotiated institution. Wartime control creates bargaining leverage; it does not, by itself, create peacetime governing authority. The unresolved question in Salalah was where one ends and the other begins.

The Oman-Iran framework that would have been discussed already contained the seeds of this transition. Their August 25 joint statement proposed a temporary navigational corridor and a joint mine-clearance project, while envisaging technical negotiations over a permanent corridor and the future administration of the strait, including information-sharing, traffic management, and navigational and security services. These are no longer emergency arrangements. They concern who writes the rules, who implements them, and who potentially derives political or economic value from compliance. The emerging fault line within the GCC is therefore not simply over whether and how to engage Iran, but over whether temporary arrangements made necessary by the war become the institutional foundation of the region’s postwar order.

Iranian participation in a future Hormuz framework is not itself anomalous. Geography makes Iran and Oman indispensable coastal states, and there is precedent for their cooperation: the existing Hormuz traffic-separation scheme was proposed by both states and adopted by the International Maritime Organization in 1968. The critical distinction is between co-authorship and hierarchy. A postwar arrangement can recognize Iran as a co-author of mutually negotiated rules without recognizing privileged authority derived from its demonstrated capacity to disrupt the system. Restoring navigation is not equivalent to determining the future governance of navigation. The former addresses an emergency while the latter distributes authority, and collapsing the two risks converting coercive leverage into an enduring institutional entitlement.

The GCC states approach this question from different positions, reflecting their distinct geographies, relations with Tehran, exposure to continued disruption, and broader security strategies. Properly coordinated, those differences could amount to a division of strategic functions. Oman’s immediate priority is separating maritime deconfliction from the wider war while preserving a regional negotiating channel, seeking to prevent continued paralysis in the strait while the parties wait for a comprehensive U.S.-Iranian settlement. Tehran has emphasized Oman’s role as its primary negotiating partner over Hormuz, given that the territorial waters of the two countries encompass the strait. That gives Muscat an indispensable procedural role, but it also creates the risk that arrangements negotiated bilaterally could acquire regional consequences before other Gulf states have consented to them.

Saudi Arabia’s concern is different. Riyadh wants any durable arrangement governing Hormuz to receive broader GCC political acceptance rather than emerging incrementally from temporary wartime measures, and it therefore distinguishes between support for engagement with Tehran and consent to the architecture produced by that engagement. Oman’s explanation that the meeting was postponed “in the interest of consensus” suggests that agreement among the Gulf states is itself becoming part of the bargaining process, and that withholding such agreement can serve as leverage.

Bahrain has staked out the clearest position at the other end of the spectrum, refusing to participate in the Salalah meeting altogether. It argued that regional security could not be preserved through “appeasement” and demanded that Hormuz remain open without discrimination, fees, or permits. Its role is less that of broker than boundary-setter, rejecting the premise that Iran’s wartime ability to regulate passage should confer a right to do so after the war. Qatar, diplomatically closer to Oman, has drawn a similarly clear distinction between negotiation and authority. Doha has remained active in mediation with Iran and other regional and international actors while insisting on the immediate and unconditional reopening of Hormuz, and it has said that any future arrangements for managing the strait should rest on regional consensus and international law. That position provides a possible bridge between Muscat’s emphasis on keeping negotiations moving and Riyadh’s concern that negotiations not outrun collective consent.

The UAE is pursuing another form of leverage altogether. Abu Dhabi has likewise demanded the unconditional reopening of Hormuz and rejected its use as an instrument of economic pressure, but it is also accelerating efforts to reduce its dependence on the strait through alternative ports, pipelines, rail links, and trade corridors. This “Zero Hormuz” strategy cannot make the waterway irrelevant, but it can reduce the value of threatening to close it. Where Oman seeks to manage Iranian leverage diplomatically and Saudi Arabia seeks to constrain it politically, the Emirati approach attempts to erode it structurally.

These approaches point toward a potentially more consequential form of Gulf coordination than a unified diplomatic position. Iran possesses immediate leverage because it can obstruct navigation; the Gulf states possess the diplomatic, legal, economic, and political capacity to confer, or withhold, the regional legitimacy necessary to turn a wartime arrangement into a durable postwar order. The larger test is whether these differentiated approaches can converge around a common political threshold. Absent one, Gulf differentiation risks becoming the mechanism through which Tehran bilateralizes questions whose consequences are inherently regional, extracting through fragmented negotiations what it could not through collective agreement. With one, Gulf diversity may acquire strategic value rather than signify fragmentation, allowing individual states to perform distinct diplomatic, political, legal, and infrastructural functions while collectively limiting the conversion of Iranian coercive leverage into institutional authority. A fuller treatment of these arguments appears in the Middle East Council on Global Affairs essay at https://mecouncil.org/blog_posts/who-gets-to-write-the-gulfs-postwar-navigation-rules/, which frames the debate over Gulf strategic autonomy as ultimately about whether the GCC states can help write the postwar rules without allowing the emergency that forced negotiations to predetermine the authority those rules confer.