Iran transmitted a 10-point counter-proposal to Washington overnight via Pakistan's Foreign Office, in which President Masoud Pezeshkian's spokesman set the price of any reopening: "the strait of Hormuz will open when all the damage caused by the imposed war is compensated through a new legal regime, using a portion of the revenue from transit fees"1.
Read what Tehran is asking for. The proposal demands Washington recognise a "new legal regime" for Hormuz, full sanctions relief, war reconstruction funds, and the cessation of Western military operations across the region. Every one of those provisions, on the strait itself, describes the situation Iran has already built. Iran's parliament legislated a permanent customs authority over the strait in late March. French and Japanese vessels have already paid Tehran's toll in yuan to transit. The IRGC toll system runs five tariff tiers and roughly 53 weekly transits, 94% below the pre-war baseline of 966 weekly crossings, yet the toll architecture itself runs at full revenue capacity.
What Iran has put on Pakistan's table is not a counter-offer; it is an invoice for international ratification of the status quo. Tehran wants Washington to sign the customs system into legal existence, not negotiate it away. The conventional sequence has been reversed: instead of trading the toll for sanctions relief, Iran is asking for sanctions relief, reconstruction, and the legal codification of the toll in a single document.
