Oman has proposed a voluntary-funded regional coalition to police security in the Strait of Hormuz, the 33km chokepoint at the mouth of The Persian Gulf that carries roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil, Al Jazeera reported on Tuesday 28 July1. Qatar, Pakistan and Egypt are running parallel proposals of their own2.
Iran wants control and toll rights over shipping near its coast; Washington insists the strait is an international waterway nobody may charge for3. Muscat has been here before. Its 30 June proposal offered shipping companies "service fees" explicitly modelled on the voluntary contributions vessels make in the Malacca and Singapore Straits, and its two co-authors immediately disagreed over whether the charges were optional or compulsory.
The Malacca model works because a private foundation administers contributions from shipowners who face no penalty for declining. Grafting it onto a strait where one coastal state calls the fee mandatory imports the ambiguity rather than settling it, and a coalition funded by voluntary contributions has no enforcement beyond its members' willingness to sail. The states being asked to sail first are the ones whose power stations, desalination plants and tankers have been under attack since 14 July.
Qatar reopened its own waters to all maritime traffic on 27 July, which restores traffic without settling who patrols the lane. Every proposal on the table addresses the movement of ships. The dispute is over who may charge them, and that question has now outlived one memorandum and two mediators' drafts.
