Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in Bahrain today, on the third leg of a tour that previously took him to the UAE and Kuwait. The thrust of his tour has been to tell his counterparts that the U.S. remains committed to the security and prosperity of the Gulf Arab states and that the U.S. absolutely opposes transit fees of any sort for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. “We now enter a new phase and one that we hope will lead to peace. It’s what we all desire. It’s what we all desire is for this region to be a place where people are focused on making money, not bombs, not weapons; where they’re focused on improving the economic lives of their people, not on how to attack other countries,” Rubio told a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council today, obviously referring to Iran. “This is what we want for the region.”
The Strait of Hormuz is “international waters,” Rubio said. “International waterways do not belong to any nation-state. This is a foundational principle in the world today without which the world would be in total chaos. If in fact we accept it, that you can charge money to use an international waterway because it happens to be near your territorial space, well, then this would spread throughout the world like a contagion.”
Rubio must have been pleased then, when Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi said that “future arrangements related to the Strait do not involve imposing any transit fees.”
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has warned against any crossings of the Strait of Hormuz without authorisation, saying vessels not complying “will be dealt with” as it criticised a new route through the waterway. “The only authorised route for passage through the Strait of Hormuz is the route announced by the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the IRGC, the ideological arm of Iran’s military, said on Thursday.
