20APR

Four states write Hormuz rules without Washington

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10:10UTC

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan met at Antalya on 18 April to expand the quadrilateral's scope to sanctions relief, maritime security and ceasefire guarantees. The United States had no seat at the table.

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Key takeaway

The Antalya four are drafting a Hormuz settlement in a room the White House chose not to sit in.

The Antalya Diplomacy Forum on 18 April hosted the third meeting of Hakan Fidan (Turkish Foreign Minister), Prince Faisal bin Farhan (Saudi Arabia), Badr Abdelatty (Egypt) and Ishaq Dar (Pakistan) ¹. Stated scope expanded beyond any prior round to sanctions relief, maritime security and multi-state ceasefire guarantees, without a US seat at the table.

Regional officials told Bloomberg and the Associated Press a two-week ceasefire extension had been agreed in principle. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the United States had not formally requested one, and Iran's Ismail Baqaei then denied the extension entirely on 20 April. The extension now rests on wire-service reporting citing regional officials; the market priced that reporting as authoritative on Friday, and the market was wrong when Brent round-tripped on Monday.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan are the four states whose ports, pipelines or airspace integration bear the direct weight of a Hormuz closure. Pakistan Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir is now the person carrying diplomatic paper Iran will read , and Pakistan Air Force F-16s are reinforcing Saudi Arabia's airspace integration in parallel. For European governments watching from Brussels, the Antalya format is where a practicable ceasefire text will plausibly be drafted, which is a shift in where the centre of gravity of the process sits.

A counter-view from Washington is that quiet Mediation works best when the United States does not claim public ownership, and that an absent US seat is tactical rather than structural. That reading sits against a 22 April ceasefire expiry with no published text behind it and no signed Iran instrument on the US side .

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan held their third meeting at a diplomatic conference in Antalya, Turkey on 18 April. This group has been trying to negotiate a ceasefire and keep the Strait of Hormuz open, without the United States in the room. For the first time, the four countries said they were also discussing sanctions relief for Iran. That is significant because US sanctions on Iran are the main economic weapon in the conflict, and the US Treasury controls them rather than any of these four countries. Meanwhile, regional officials told wire services a two-week ceasefire extension had been agreed in principle. But Iran's foreign ministry spokesman denied it the same day, and the White House said the US had not formally requested an extension. Only a wire service citing unnamed regional officials is confirming a deal that no government has publicly signed.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The Antalya quadrilateral emerged because four states have economic exposure to Hormuz throughput that Washington does not share. Turkey processes Russian crude for European re-export; Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the two largest alternative suppliers but need Hormuz stable to maintain their own export routes.

Egypt's Suez revenues depend on tanker flows that Hormuz disruption redirects; Pakistan's oil import bill is dominated by Gulf crude. All four have more direct economic incentive to stop the war than the US does.

What could happen next?

Opportunity
The Antalya format's expanded scope over sanctions relief creates a regional buy-in mechanism that could anchor a post-ceasefire deal if Washington eventually co-signs the framework.
Risk
A ceasefire extension confirmed only by wire services citing unnamed regional officials is fragile: Iran's denial and Washington's non-request leave the 22 April deadline without any signed text behind it.

Source Landscape

This story draws on mixed-leaning sources from Türkiye

Türkiye

Primary parallel: The 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) required a P5+1 format (the US, UK, France, Russia and China plus Germany) because sanctions relief required US and EU legislative or executive action that no regional format could substitute. The Antalya quadrilateral's claim of sanctions-relief scope attempts to compress that architecture into four states, none of which control the sanctions architecture that matters most to Tehran.

Counter-parallel: The 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea was negotiated bilaterally by the US and North Korea without a regional format, then collapsed partly because South Korea and Japan were not invested in its delivery. The Antalya model inverts that failure: it builds regional buy-in first, without US participation, which may produce regional durability at the cost of US-deliverable sanctions relief.

Consensus view: Chatham House's Sanam Vakil notes the Antalya quadrilateral's third meeting is the first time a regional format has claimed scope over sanctions relief, a domain previously treated as bilateral US-Iran territory.

By placing sanctions relief on the table, Fidan, bin Farhan, Abdelatty and Dar are collectively signalling that a regional solution may require partial sanctions unwinding that Washington has not authorised, creating a gap between what the four states are promising and what they can deliver.

Counter-view: The Ankara Policy Center's Selim Koru argues the scope expansion is deliberate diplomatic positioning: by claiming sanctions relief as a regional concern, the quartet acquires veto-adjacent status in any eventual US-Iran deal, because a ceasefire built on guarantees the four states negotiated cannot be sustained if Washington undercuts those guarantees with OFAC actions.

Fidan, bin Farhan, Abdelatty and Dar gain veto-adjacent status in any eventual US-Iran deal precisely by claiming that scope.

Key tension: Whether the quadrilateral's absence of a US seat is a diplomatic asset (Iran talks to it precisely because Washington is not in the room) or a structural limit (it cannot deliver on sanctions relief without US Treasury cooperation).

First Reported In

Update #74 · Two unsigned rulebooks collide at Hormuz

Hurriyet Daily News· 20 Apr 2026

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Different Perspectives

China

Beijing's MOFCOM Blocking Rules constrain OFAC enforcement on the mainland; China has not corroborated Trump's verbal account of any bilateral summit, and the rial's failure to hold its Rubio bounce, combined with the IRGC's stablecoin rail closure, increases Chinese yuan-denominated oil-payment exposure through Hormuz.

Israel

IDF Chief Zamir said on 3 June there is no ceasefire for his forces even as Israel signed the Washington Lebanon framework requiring Hezbollah withdrawal south of the Litani; a UNIFIL peacekeeper was killed by mortar near Marjayoun on the same day, exposing the gap between the diplomatic framework and a ground advance that has not stopped.

Bahrain

The IRGC struck Bahrain on 3 June as its sirens sounded and its PAC-3 magazine neared exhaustion; excluded from Rubio's 2 May emergency resupply, Bahrain received a 50-round Federal Register notice on 1 June on an 18-month delivery timeline, meaning it is defending the US Fifth Fleet headquarters on the last rounds it has.

Qatar

Qatar offered $6bn under OFAC Licence L-2 restrictions and sent Ghalibaf's delegation home empty-handed; the $6bn ceiling is a legal constraint, not a negotiating floor, and Rubio's no-sanctions-relief testimony means Qatar cannot revise it without White House action that has not been requested.

Kuwait

Kuwait expelled two Iranian diplomats within 24 hours of the airport strike, the strongest and fastest Kuwaiti diplomatic move of the conflict, while keeping the full mission in place to preserve a communication channel; it has now invoked Article 51 self-defence, filed a formal protest, and expelled diplomats, exhausting its formal toolkit short of full rupture.

United States

Trump narrated a weekend deal while the channel Rubio described under oath, Khamenei's written-only couriers with a 3-to-5-day lag, cannot answer at that speed; CENTCOM called the airport strike deliberate, calculated and unjustified. The House 215-208 vote gave Congress its first on-record war-powers position against the deployment Trump has run without a signed instrument for 96 days.