Iran has taken the strait to a table Washington is not at

Days after calling an American signature the only route to reopening Hormuz, Tehran convened the Gulf's littoral states to manage the strait — a body its wire had not named since the memorandum.

Published 2026-09-12 · analysis

Iran's foreign ministry said on Friday afternoon that Iran and the other Persian Gulf littoral states will sit down in Oman next week to discuss regional issues, the Tehran–Muscat deal for managing shipping through the Strait of Hormuz among them. Three days and four hours earlier, the foreign minister had said the way to restore normal conditions in the strait was for the United States to return to the Islamabad memorandum. Friday's announcement names no American role, and today the foreign minister called his Omani counterpart ahead of the meeting. The reopening has acquired a second venue, and the second one does not need Washington's consent to convene.

The memorandum Tehran wants Washington back inside is where this meeting comes from. Pezeshkian signed it on 17 June: toll-free passage for sixty days only, removal of the US naval blockade, sanctions relief — and the strait's future administration to be determined by Iran in consultation with Oman and the Gulf states. The Gulf states as a body appear exactly twice in the 193 statements this record holds since 18 February: in that signing line, and in Friday's announcement. Across the 159 statements in between, nobody named them once. Iran suspended the memorandum on 18 July and has spent the weeks since demanding the other signatory perform it. The clause it has chosen to perform itself is the one that requires no American.

Until Friday the Oman track was a two-party story, and a gated one. Thirteen items on Tehran's wire between 22 August and 8 September carried it — from the joint statement of 25 August announcing a temporary joint corridor and a joint mine-clearing project, to Tuesday's briefing of parliament's national security commission — and not one of the thirteen names a third state; the framework Tasnim reported on 26 August was built around “the sovereign rights of the two countries.” Every time Tehran was asked when the corridor starts, the answer was Washington: a lawmaker on 28 August said the naval blockade had to go first, and the deputy foreign minister said on 30 August that implementation hinges on American commitments. Widening the table is the first move on this track that does not run through that gate.

What is being carried to the regional table has not moved any ships. The corridor was agreed on 25 August; the transit series here runs five days past it, to 30 August, and over those five days the seven-day average of Hormuz crossings went from 4.6 a day to 4.3, against roughly 84 a day in the year before the crisis. The other end of the channel has gone quiet in the same stretch. The last Hormuz post on the American account is 3 September, nine days ago, and the last one to address a deal is 2 September's: not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table, “I couldn't care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement.” Nine days later Tehran named a table, and it is the Gulf shoreline.

So the thing to watch changes. For six months the only mechanism that could reopen this strait was American — the blockade, the memorandum, a post naming terms — and all twelve reopening contracts that have resolved in this record settled NO while everyone watched Washington for the answer. There is now a second mechanism, and it moves first: whether the littoral states actually meet in Muscat next week, and whether what they publish names the corridor. If the strait's administration becomes a regional arrangement, an American signature stops being a veto over reopening and becomes a choice about whether to contest one. The tape has nothing to say about it yet — the official close series ends at 9 September, two days before the announcement.

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