The Draft Nobody Can Sign

Iranian and Omani negotiators finished their text on the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday. Tehran's foreign ministry called it the final stage of drafting and promised a joint statement, provided certain parties did not obstruct the process. The parties it had in mind were American.

Finishing a draft is normally the moment a negotiation stops being speculative. This one arrived complete and inert.

Start with the money, because the fee is the whole substance of the dispute. It decides whether this is a shipping arrangement or a standing Iranian right to charge for a fifth of the world's traded oil and gas. Three versions of that fee circulated on the day the text was finished. Revolutionary Guard media said the deal carries insurance, fuelling and environmental charges. A senior Saudi source said it contains no transit fees or service charges of any kind. Regional officials briefing reporters described service fees for security and environmental protection. Washington has said for weeks that it strongly opposes any Iranian charge at all. A finished text whose own reported parties cannot agree on whether its central provision exists has deferred the hard term rather than resolved it.

The second obstacle is a precondition nobody at the table controls. The agreement is understood to depend on the United States lifting its naval blockade of Iranian ports, which Washington has refused for months. The two governments that wrote the draft therefore cannot bring it into force between them, and the government that can is the one Tehran's spokesman was pre-emptively accusing of obstruction. The text also waits on a supreme leader who was wounded in the war's opening strikes in February and has not appeared in public since.

One thing this fortnight did decide, and it points away from the announcement. Two weeks ago Oman put a plan to Tehran with Gulf backing, built on the Malacca template of joint regional supervision funded by voluntary contributions from shippers. Iran rejected it on 29 July, objecting to the shared supervision rather than to the money. It has not come back. What replaced it gives Iran sole management of everything entering the Gulf and an Omani lane for outbound traffic, with a central route later where Muscat co-manages exits alone. Oman's shared supervision survives over half the traffic, inside an architecture Tehran drew. The mediator finished the fortnight administering one lane in somebody else's design.

Whether the remaining gaps are the last mile or the reason there is no road is genuinely unsettled. The American president says an announcement could come tomorrow or the next day. His treasury secretary says days, citing a degraded Iranian navy and air force. His vice president said on that same Wednesday that the effort looks messy and will take time. Central Command maintains the southern route is open and that passage requires nobody's permission, while Tehran insists the strait will never again be the open waterway it was in February. The two sides have yet to agree on what the strait is now, which makes agreeing on its future more than a drafting exercise.

The bill, meanwhile, is arriving somewhere nobody is announcing. Iraq draws more than nine tenths of its revenue from oil that normally transits Hormuz, and monthly oil income has fallen from $6.8 billion in February to roughly $2.3 billion. More than a million public employees are still owed their July salaries, and protests reached six governorates this week. Baghdad has been paying in stages since late July, and it pays the security forces and the Popular Mobilisation Forces before it pays the universities. Iran's leverage over the strait is being funded, in the most literal way available, out of the treasury of the state that hosts its closest partners.