Hormuz’s Only Written Free-Passage Guarantee Expires Tomorrow, and the Blockade It Cancelled Never Lifted

The Congressional Research Service report R45281, updated within the past week, records that an April 7, 2026 ceasefire halted major combat operations, that Iran continued efforts to exert control over the Strait, and that Washington responded with a blockade on shipping to or from Iranian ports. It then states that on 17 June Trump and President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding declaring the “removal of [the U.S.] naval blockade” and Iranian “arrangements … for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only”. Sixty days from 17 June falls on Sunday 16 August; that arithmetic is ours, and the memorandum’s own text has not surfaced in the public record we can see. What has surfaced is the asymmetry. CNN’s live file of Friday 14 August reports the US naval blockade remains in effect, barring ships to or from any Iranian port whether inside or outside the strait, with one Iranian-flagged ship inbound and one outbound over the past seven days, and Panama and Liberia the most common transiting flags.

Nothing has been put in the clause’s place. Bloomberg, on 14 August, reports that Iran and Oman have yet to reach an accord to reopen the waterway, after optimism earlier in the week that agreement was near. That absence is the diplomatic fact of the day. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on 2 August, in a Telegram post reported by Al Jazeera, that the Muscat talks were in their “final stages”, while insisting the waterway would never return to its pre-war status; by 9 August he told NBC there were no ongoing negotiations with Washington and that “the intermediaries are still making efforts to find ways to resume negotiations”, and told Iranian state media that an agreement with Oman does not mean the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened. On the American side, Al Jazeera’s Friday live file is headlined on the United States eyeing an indefinite blockade. A Trading Economics market note attributes to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a plan for “unprecedented” economic measures alongside the blockade, with announcements next week — an aggregator paraphrase with no venue, date or quote, and it should not be treated as a Treasury statement.

The president spent Friday afternoon on the subject in Garden City, Long Island, telling law-enforcement officers, in NBC News' rendering: “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.” NBC News, Al Jazeera and Political Wire report the line as a stated intention; the Washington Times files the same remark under a headline saying Trump “jokes about annexing” the waterway. He also argued higher American pump prices were worth keeping a weapon out of Iran’s hands, a position Al Jazeera set against a late-July Quinnipiac poll it cites as showing 60 percent of US voters opposed to military action — sample size and field dates not established. The market read is unsettled: Trading Economics put Brent at $88.38 on Friday, up 34.22 percent year-on-year; Fortune had it at $90.28 the previous morning. NBC’s own traffic tracker now uses the past tense: “Twenty percent of the world’s natural gas and oil used to pass through the strait.”

Assessment: The instructive thing is not that a deadline is arriving but that neither government has an interest in marking it. For Washington, letting the passage clause lapse silently converts a negotiated sixty days into an open-ended blockade without a new decision to defend. For Tehran, saying nothing preserves the position Araghchi has held all month: that the strait is Iran’s to close and Oman’s talks are about a route, not a reopening. Distrust the traffic figures first. Trading Economics reports some tankers switching off transponders, which corrupts every transit count in circulation, and the Lloyd’s List brief of 5 August carries two irreconcilable weekly totals. Distrust the 56 damage reports until CNN names the tracker that produced them. And distrust our own sixty-day arithmetic until someone publishes the memorandum. The wider pattern in this edition is the same: Bamako’s eighty-two freed soldiers with no stated terms, a February peace document Washington called acceptable to both Sudanese parties, four Brotherhood designations against thirty-one named jurisdictions. Announcement is cheap; performance is what nobody is counting.