Six months into the war, the negotiation over the Strait of Hormuz has reached an odd stage: mediators have asked Iran to write down what it actually wants, Iran says it is doing so, and the country enforcing the blockade says it is not part of the conversation.

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said this week that Tehran is compiling a list of conditions for reopening the strait, at the request of intermediaries. He also said Iran had agreed with Oman on a shipping corridor through the waterway — provided the United States met those conditions.

The condition attached to the conditions

That final clause is the whole difficulty. President Trump said this week that the United States is not in talks with Iran and is instead concentrating on economic punishment. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the economic campaign would continue until Iran was prepared to negotiate seriously. The Treasury secretary has described the pressure programme in terms borrowed from military history.

So Iran is drafting terms for a party that says it is not receiving them. This is less strange than it sounds. Conditions written for mediators are not only addressed to Washington; they are addressed to Oman and Qatar, who have to decide whether the list is realistic enough to carry, and to shipowners and insurers, who are watching for any sign that the risk is falling.

Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, met Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, in Tehran this week and also saw the speaker of the Iranian parliament. That is the mediation channel doing what mediation channels do when the principals are not speaking.

What is actually being negotiated

It helps to separate three things that get merged in headlines.

The corridor is a narrow, agreed route with agreed procedures, worked out between Iran and Oman. It is a practical arrangement, not a peace deal, and Tehran has been explicit that the strait remains closed in principle until the war ends.

The mines are a separate problem with its own timetable. Clearance is measured in probabilities rather than declarations, and an agreement on paper does not by itself make a lane safe.

The sanctions and the naval enforcement are the American lever, and they are what Iran’s list of conditions is presumably aimed at. None of the first two can fully work while the third is running at full strength, which is why the corridor talks keep arriving at the same wall.

The number that has stopped moving

Before the war, something in the order of a fifth of the world’s oil supply passed through the strait. Oil prices remain well above pre-war levels but have eased in recent weeks, which is the market’s way of saying that it has stopped expecting either a sudden reopening or a sudden escalation.

That settling is not good news in itself. It reflects the fact that buyers have rebuilt supply chains around the strait rather than through it, and rerouted supply is expensive supply. Every month the arrangement holds, the cost of the detour hardens into the normal price of oil.

What would count as movement

Three things are worth watching in the coming weeks, in ascending order of significance: whether Iran’s list is actually delivered to the mediators and made public in any form; whether the corridor carries a commercial cargo rather than a demonstration voyage; and whether the United States acknowledges receiving anything at all. The third is the one that would matter.

Related coverage: the corridor talks that do not include Washington, and where the missing barrels have gone.

Sources

Reuters; Just Security’s Early Edition; Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs; White House briefings; Iranian state media.