17AUG

Rubio lands in UAE: no Hormuz tolls

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15:37UTC

Marco Rubio arrived in the United Arab Emirates on 23 June declaring Washington will not accept tolls on the Strait of Hormuz, the same day Iran and Oman signed a committee to set them.

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Key takeaway

Rubio toured the Gulf rejecting Hormuz tolls the day Iran and Oman signed a body to impose them.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in the United Arab Emirates on 23 June and declared Washington "will not accept tolls or fees" on the Strait of Hormuz ¹. The statement landed the same day Iran and Oman signed a joint committee in Muscat to determine exactly those fees, a body grounded in the sovereign-waters framing Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority first established .

Rubio is the senior US diplomat, and his Gulf tour is a reassurance mission: The Gulf Arab monarchies have watched the Islamabad MoU reorder the regional balance with no seat for them at its table. His itinerary runs from the UAE to Kuwait, then to a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) session in Bahrain on 25 June, the regional union of six Gulf states and the first formal multilateral response to the memorandum.

A verbal US objection to tolls now sits against a signed Iran-Oman instrument that asserts the right to charge them, and the GCC meeting follows the Qatar-Pakistan communique that set the 60-day roadmap . Rubio is touring capitals to hold a coalition together; Iran spent the same day putting a head-of-state signature on paper.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew to the United Arab Emirates on 23 June; the same day Iran and Oman signed their joint agreement to set fees on the Strait of Hormuz. His message was direct: America will not accept anyone charging for passage through the strait. He then planned to visit Kuwait and attend a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council; the club of six Gulf Arab monarchies; in Bahrain on 25 June. Oman's decision to co-sign the Muscat committee worries the other five Gulf monarchies, who depend on the strait for their own oil exports. The Islamabad ceasefire deal signed the previous week gave Iran some of what it wanted, and the Bahrain GCC session on 25 June is the first chance for those five countries to formally respond.

Source Landscape

Primary parallel: Rubio's 2026 Gulf tour mirrors James Baker's 1991 post-Gulf War Gulf reassurance circuit, where Baker visited each Gulf Cooperation Council member individually to shore up the coalition before the Madrid peace conference. Baker's visits succeeded in holding the GCC together on Iraq policy, but Saudi Arabia and Kuwait nonetheless pursued separate economic arrangements with Baghdad within three years, illustrating the limits of reassurance diplomacy in locking in position.

Counter-parallel: Henry Kissinger's 1973-74 shuttle diplomacy after the Yom Kippur War achieved lasting Sinai disengagement agreements precisely because the US was willing to impose costs on Israel as well as reassure Arab states. Rubio's visit carries no comparable leverage: Washington is not offering to impose costs on Oman for co-signing the Muscat committee, making the reassurance structurally incomplete.

The Gulf Cooperation Council session in Bahrain on 25 June has direct consequences for the oil market: if the GCC formally rejects the Muscat committee's fee mandate, that rejection will be cited by every shipowner and insurer seeking to justify not paying the fee. A GCC-endorsed navigation-fee boycott, backed by US declarations, gives the Lloyd's-Chubb consortium political cover to continue writing coverage without sanctioning compliance with PGSA or the new bilateral committee fees.

Conversely, if the GCC communique is ambiguous or silent on the committee, the market will interpret Oman's co-signature as a GCC-tolerated fait accompli, and the August fee-start date from the PGSA will carry more weight.

Consensus view: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Karim Sadjadpour and the Emirates Policy Center's Christian Koch both note that Rubio's reassurance tour follows a pattern established after every major Gulf security shift: the US secretary of state visits within 72 hours, repeats existing red lines, and schedules a multilateral meeting.

The GCC Bahrain session on 25 June is the structural equivalent of the May 2003 Sharm el-Sheikh summit after the Iraq invasion; a gathering designed to reassure monarchies about a regional order the US has already altered without consulting them.

Counter-view: Gulf Research Center analyst Hussein Ibish argues The Gulf monarchies are not primarily worried about Iranian tolls; they are worried that the Islamabad MoU legitimises Iran as a regional governance actor. Rubio's no-tolls declaration misses the strategic concern: the fee is the symptom, not the disease. Oman's co-signature on the Muscat committee is the development the UAE and Saudi Arabia find alarming.

Key tension: Whether the GCC can produce a unified communique that explicitly names and rejects the Muscat committee without fracturing GCC-Oman relations, given that Oman is a GCC member state and a co-signatory to the instrument the other five members oppose.

First Reported In

Update #137 · Iran and Oman claim the strait; US says no

US State Department· 24 Jun 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Iran and Oman claim the strait

Rubio's UAE no-tolls declaration is a direct response to the Iran-Oman Muscat committee signing, both occurring on 23 June.

Occurred 23 Jun 2026

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This Event

Rubio lands in UAE: no Hormuz tolls

The US is reassuring Gulf monarchies with words while Iran builds a signed fee instrument on the water.

Led to

GCC backs free passage, splits on Oman

Rubio's 23 June UAE no-tolls declaration (ID:4462) set the agenda for the 25 June Manama GCC ministerial and the resulting zero-fees communique.

Occurred 25 Jun 2026

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Oman's Hormuz fee splits its authors

The White House's rejection of Oman's fees restates the zero-fees line Rubio and the GCC set in Manama.

Occurred 30 Jun 2026

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Different Perspectives

Shipping and insurance underwriters

Kpler counted five Hormuz transits on 16 August against 31 the previous weekend, while Windward logged four vessels going AIS-dark for up to a month; underwriters price both the attacks and a sanctions register that names their counterparties in unreadable scanned images. Two trackers now measure only the ships that consent to be seen.

China

China sits at the end of the payment chain the 14 August designation targets: Iran's shadow banking network exists to convert sanctioned oil sales, much of it to Chinese refiners, into usable funds. Beijing has previously refused to recognise OFAC's jurisdiction over its own entities buying Iranian crude, leaving this designation to test compliance rather than change trade.

Qatar

Qatar's foreign ministry denied on 16 August holding any Iranian pilots alive, contradicting Iranian General Mohammad Bagherzadeh's claim that Doha holds three Su-24 aircrew, and said it had recovered only one set of remains. Qatar carries Iran's messages to Washington, and this is a public break with Tehran over a fact only one aircrew inquiry can settle.

Oman

Oman's shipping-map talks, covering monitoring, environment and maritime services, were publicly decoupled from any Hormuz reopening by Iran's own foreign minister on 17 August. Muscat's mediation channel keeps functioning on the narrow file it was given, while the political decision it hoped to unlock stays with Iran's security council.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia separately called the recurrence of tanker attacks on Emirati shipping a dangerous escalation, breaking from the UAE's repeated formula. Riyadh speaking in its own name over an attack on another state's vessels signals it reads the pattern differently from Abu Dhabi's flat statements.

United Arab Emirates

The UAE foreign ministry condemned a third ADNOC-linked tanker attack on 15 August in language identical, word for word, to its statement the day before. Three consecutive strikes on Emirati shipping have not moved Abu Dhabi's public wording by a single adjective.