If the United States and Iran Really Are Co-Managing the Strait, This Is a Turning Point in World History

A story that sounds almost unbelievable is circulating as unconfirmed reporting. Fragments in the coverage around the recent US-Iran ceasefire, including the CNN live file on the Iran situation, have hinted at the idea that the United States and Iran might, in some practical form, jointly manage transit through the Strait of Hormuz. There is no formal announcement. There is no treaty text. What there is amounts to unofficial framing buried inside broader coverage. This article is therefore explicitly a commentary on unconfirmed reports, not an explanation of confirmed facts. With that caveat in front, I still think it is worth taking the idea seriously as a possibility, because if it ever became real it would mark a turning point in the modern world order. Treating it as a joke before examining it is too easy, and too lazy.

Start with historical weight. The United States and Iran have been effective adversaries since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the US embassy hostage crisis. The nuclear program standoff, proxy conflicts in the Gulf, the Syrian civil war, the war in Yemen, and several direct military incidents have kept the two states locked in a nearly fifty-year cycle of distrust. Proposing that these two governments jointly manage the most sensitive maritime chokepoint in the world is, by any normal diplomatic standard, absurd. But historical turning points often arrive wrapped in exactly that kind of absurdity. The hotline between Washington and Moscow established after the Cuban Missile Crisis would have sounded absurd only a few years earlier. History sometimes rewards the patience of those who take seriously things the ordinary imagination refuses to consider.

The contours of this story become clearer when you factor in Trump’s diplomatic style. Trump has always prioritized transactional deals over the consistency of traditional alliance management. In his first term he met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in person, demanded detailed burden sharing from NATO allies, and pursued unconventional trade negotiations with China. In each case, he ignored the script that a more orthodox president would have followed. A practical, limited, transactional understanding with Iran over the operation of a strategic chokepoint fits directly into that instinct. For Trump, whether a country is formally classified as an adversary matters less than whether a deal can be closed, and the optics of closing an improbable deal are, in his political universe, part of the appeal.

On the Iranian side, a limited arrangement of this kind has real attractions. Iran has been ground down by years of sanctions, and its domestic environment is marked by high youth unemployment, inflation, and simmering frustration. Rejoining the international economic order, even partially, is critical to regime stability and to any serious economic recovery. If Iran can cooperate with the United States on something practical and visible like the operation of the strait, that is a potential first step toward staged sanctions relief. It also sends a psychological message to the Arab Gulf states. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar all benefit from a stable strait. If Iran can credibly present itself as one of the stable co-managers of that strait, its regional position shifts meaningfully, and not in a way that the Gulf capitals can simply ignore.

A note of caution is necessary. Hardline factions inside both countries can be expected to resist an arrangement of this kind strongly. Inside the United States, conservative Republicans, a segment of Iran-hawkish Democrats, and pro-Israel lobbying groups would all fight it. Inside Iran, the Revolutionary Guard and conservative clerical factions would attack any deal with the United States as a betrayal of revolutionary principles. Whether the political leadership on each side can overcome or sidestep this internal resistance depends on details invisible to outside observers. So I do not want to lock in either the conclusion that this deal is likely or the conclusion that it is impossible. Both positions feel premature given the very thin information currently available.

What would joint management actually look like in practice? Physical co-management of a waterway is not a self-explanatory concept. A relatively modest version would involve sharing vessel tracking data and agreeing on emergency response protocols. A more ambitious version might include joint naval presence for safety operations in specific zones. The most dramatic imaginable version is some kind of formal transit framework with a revenue-sharing arrangement across the two governments and perhaps the Gulf states. Each step upward in ambition introduces larger technical, legal, and political complications, including compatibility with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the interests of third parties, and the internal politics of the littoral states. Even the most modest version would be historically unusual, and anything more ambitious would be almost unprecedented.

What does this mean for Japan? The fact that over ninety percent of Japan’s imported crude oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz is a very strong reason to treat this story as directly relevant, whatever its ultimate fate. If an arrangement does take shape, even briefly, Japan’s short-term energy security would improve and the risk of sharp price spikes would ease somewhat. At the same time, a US-Iran working relationship on this scale would completely rewrite the assumptions of Japan’s Middle East diplomacy. For decades, Tokyo has operated under a two-layer approach: public alignment with the United States combined with quiet maintenance of independent channels to both Gulf capitals and Tehran. A direct US-Iran understanding collapses the gap between those two layers, and Japan would risk losing its accustomed place in the middle of them if it did not adapt quickly.

The reactions of China and Russia are also part of the picture. China has been deepening its ties with Gulf states while simultaneously maintaining strategic cooperation with Iran. A bilateral US-Iran arrangement on the strait would be read in Beijing as an attempt to exclude China from the region’s strategic architecture. Russia, which has gained renewed interest in the Middle East since the invasion of Ukraine, would insist on some form of voice in the new setup. The result could be that what begins as a bilateral framework between Washington and Tehran is gradually pulled into a broader multilateral arrangement. That broader form would be more complicated to negotiate, but it might, paradoxically, be more stable in practice because stability in the strait is something every major power has an interest in preserving.

Historical comparisons help put the idea in perspective. Joint management of a strategic waterway by adversarial or previously adversarial powers is not actually unprecedented. The Suez Canal spent decades under collective European management. The Panama Canal transitioned from joint US-Panama management to full Panamanian sovereignty. Postwar Berlin was under four-power joint administration of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union. These precedents show that practical cooperation can arise inside political conflict, and that such cooperation sometimes outlasts the political relationships around it. They also show that every such arrangement came with costs and required decades of adjustment. A Hormuz experiment, if it occurred, would slot into this lineage as an ambitious modern attempt at something the world has tried in different shapes before.

It is only fair to list the reasons why this story sounds unrealistic as well. First, Iran’s religious leadership has fundamental objections to any overt cooperation with the United States. Second, hardliners in Washington will attack any agreement as concession to Iran. Third, Israel maintains uncompromising opposition to Iranian policy and any US-Iran warming would immediately chill Israeli-American relations. Fourth, Saudi Arabia has spent years defining itself as Iran’s regional rival, and a formal US-Iran framework could complicate that dynamic in ways that Riyadh would not accept quietly. Any one of these objections could derail a deal entirely. The stacking of all four at once makes the scenario genuinely difficult, which is a legitimate reason for skepticism, even if it is not a reason to dismiss the possibility entirely.

Still, the possibility of unexpected change should not be treated as negligible. International relations sometimes shifts quietly in exactly the moments when almost every observer considers change impossible. The end of the Cold War is the canonical example. A few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, almost nobody seriously expected it. History is full of changes that happened inside the boundary of accepted imagination and changes that broke through that boundary. A US-Iran arrangement on the Strait of Hormuz is currently the kind of story most Middle East specialists would classify as implausible. Classifying it as impossible is a different, stronger claim, and it is the claim I am not quite willing to make. Careful attention to reporting fragments, diplomatic movements, and internal political shifts is how observers sometimes notice change before it becomes obvious.

The question of how media should handle unconfirmed information is also important here. Journalism dealing with rumored developments has to be both careful and imaginative at the same time. Early certainty becomes misinformation. But refusing to discuss possibilities robs readers of material for their own thinking. Japanese media tends to be relatively conservative about unconfirmed stories, and reports about plausible scenarios discussed actively abroad often get less airtime inside Japan than they deserve. A practical response for readers is to read multiple international outlets in parallel, accepting the different editorial temperaments as a collective source of perspective. This is particularly useful for complicated geopolitical topics, where any single national media ecosystem carries its own blind spots.

I want to be honest about my own position. Part of me hopes this story turns out to be real. The half century of hostility between the United States and Iran has inflicted enormous costs on the Middle East and, by extension, on the entire world. Any genuine movement toward cooperation, however partial, would be good news for global stability. At the same time, I hold a realist view that progress of this kind rarely unfolds as smoothly as hope prefers. I am sitting between hope and realism and trying not to commit too strongly to either. Diplomacy is the long accumulation of many small interactions, not any single news event. Avoiding overreaction to each individual headline while tracking the underlying direction is the appropriate posture, and it is the posture I am trying to maintain in my own reading.

Japan’s possible role in this moment deserves thought. Japan is a US ally, maintains cordial relations with the Gulf states, and has long preserved a certain independent relationship with Iran. This unusual position could, in principle, make Japan a useful mediator for specific practical details that neither Washington nor Tehran can easily address directly. In practice, whether Japan’s diplomatic apparatus has the will and the capability to play that kind of role is a separate question. Historically, Japanese Middle East diplomacy has been relatively passive and has preferred not to lead. If this is actually a moment when leadership is possible, it would test whether Japan is willing to step forward instead of remaining comfortably in the wings. That test is about more than this one file. It is about the country’s broader posture in an increasingly multipolar world.

I want to ask readers a direct question. Whether this story turns into a historical turning point is impossible to know at this moment. It may fade as a rumor in a few weeks, or it may be remembered in years to come as the beginning of something larger. Either way, the posture with which each of us reads international news will keep being tested. Do we only follow the surface of headlines, or do we read while actively imagining both possibilities and limits? That small habit of reading, repeated day after day, becomes the shield that protects individual judgment inside the noise of modern information. Exactly because this story is uncertain, I want to meet it with calm seriousness and active imagination, and I expect to keep opening Middle East coverage tomorrow with the same posture.

One more addition before I stop. If a Hormuz arrangement takes shape and, a few years from now, is discussed as a successful case, the same pattern might be applied to other strategic chokepoints. The Strait of Malacca, the Bab el-Mandeb, the Bosporus at the exit of the Black Sea, the new Arctic shipping routes. The world has several waterways whose management is unstable when handled unilaterally. If adversaries can learn, even in a limited way, to co-manage them, that could become part of the new skeleton of the twenty-first century international order. It sounds like a fairy tale. But if we dismiss every fairy tale as impossible, we lose the ability to notice when reality is quietly shifting in its direction. Taking possibilities seriously, even uncomfortable ones, is the starting point of a calm reading of international news, and that is the reading I try to offer here.

One final thought on temperament. Reading about possible diplomatic breakthroughs is easier than living inside them, and nothing I write in this blog changes the daily reality of the soldiers, sailors, and civilians whose lives hang on whether a strait stays open or closes. When I ask readers to keep imagination alive while also staying grounded in realism, I am not asking for enthusiasm or for cynicism. I am asking for the kind of steady attention that honors the seriousness of the moment without collapsing into either panic or dismissal. That is not a glamorous intellectual habit, but it is the one that, over time, leaves citizens better equipped to understand the world they actually live in. And on a story as potentially consequential as a US-Iran arrangement at the Strait of Hormuz, better understanding is itself a small contribution to whatever outcome eventually arrives.

A specific note on sourcing discipline is appropriate here. When a story circulates as unconfirmed reporting, the reader’s most useful skill is source discernment. Which journalist is writing? Which outlet is publishing? What track record does that journalist or publication have on similar stories? In geopolitics, much of the early coverage depends on anonymous sources with their own interests. Reading carefully means thinking about which camp an anonymous briefer is likely to belong to, what they might be trying to accomplish, and how the framing of their comments fits into ongoing political battles. These habits sound like the work of professional analysts, but with a little practice they are entirely within reach of ordinary readers. Compare multiple sources. Note the position of each speaker. Track how a story evolves over time. These unglamorous habits, stacked across months and years, meaningfully improve the quality of a reader’s own judgment, and that judgment feeds directly into voting, investing, and the conversations people have at their own kitchen tables.

It is also worth saying something about the asymmetry of attention in this kind of story. When a dramatic diplomatic possibility is floated, it receives a surge of attention for a few days, followed by a long tail of silence as the story either collapses or fades into quiet backroom negotiation. Most of the actual diplomatic work happens during that quiet tail, invisible to the news cycle. Readers who drop attention the moment the headlines fade miss the period in which real outcomes are shaped. Sustained, quiet attention is harder than brief enthusiasm, but it is the discipline that allows a reader to understand what is actually happening rather than what is merely being announced. This pattern is not unique to Middle East stories. It applies to trade negotiations, arms control talks, climate summits, and nearly any long diplomatic process. The people who end up with the clearest picture are usually not the ones who shouted loudest during the announcement week. They are the ones who kept reading after the room went quiet.

Finally, I want to leave this article as something like a dated journal entry. A few years from now, when I look back at this post, I will be able to remember what I was thinking and feeling at this specific moment in 2026. News articles and academic papers record facts, but they rarely preserve the texture of how a particular reader lived through a particular time. Blogs exist in part to fill that gap. Writing carefully about uncertain news, while clearly acknowledging that the news is uncertain, leaves a small honest trace for both my future self and my present readers. Whether the story of a US-Iran arrangement on the Strait of Hormuz ends up in history books, or quietly vanishes from memory, I do not know. Precisely because I do not know, there is value in writing down, right now, what the possibility feels like to think through carefully. That is one of the main reasons I keep this blog at all, and I want to honor the uncertainty rather than flatten it into false confidence.

One concluding reflection on what it means to write about the Middle East from Tokyo. Japan’s relationship with the Middle East is unusual in a way that deserves honest acknowledgment. Unlike the United States, Japan has no crusading ideological project in the region. Unlike European countries, it carries no direct colonial legacy there. Unlike China, it has no sprawling infrastructure investment footprint tying it to specific regimes. What Japan has is a deep energy dependence, a reputation for being reasonable and non-threatening, and a set of long-term diplomatic channels that have quietly survived the ups and downs of regional politics. Writing about a possible US-Iran arrangement from this Japanese vantage point is therefore a slightly different exercise than writing about it from Washington, London, or Riyadh. It forces me to ask what the story means for a country that is affected by the Middle East without being at the center of its conflicts. That question, repeated week after week, is a large part of what this blog is trying to do, and I think it becomes more important, not less, in a period when the world order itself seems to be reshuffling quietly in the background. That reshuffle will continue regardless of whether any single Japanese reader is paying attention, but the texture of how Japan navigates the coming decade will depend, in part, on whether enough people here choose to watch carefully rather than look away.