Iran says nothing has changed for shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, after two days of talks with Oman in Tehran
Iran's foreign ministry said on Sunday that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is unchanged, in the same briefing in which it called two days of talks with Oman useful.
Esmaeil Baqaei, the ministry spokesman, said the talks ran on the two previous days in Tehran at the level of deputy foreign ministers, and that the two sides exchanged views on common principles and practical mechanisms for ensuring safe maritime traffic through the strait while respecting the sovereign rights of the two littoral states. He said progress had been made. The Omani delegation left Tehran on Saturday afternoon, and consultations at both the technical and the political level are to continue. Asked separately about the current situation for shipping, Baqaei said there had been no change in the status of maritime traffic in the waterway.
Two things in that are worth separating. One is a negotiation, which is going somewhere its participants describe as useful. The other is the water, where by Tehran's own account the position today is the position yesterday.
The account is IRNA's, the Iranian state news agency, and it is linked below. It is the channel through which the ministry speaks, which makes it the right document for what the ministry said and the wrong document for anything else. IRNA's own framing of the wider conflict is the government's, and none of it is carried here.
The shape of the mechanism is the part with commercial consequences. Baqaei described principles and mechanisms agreed between the two coastal states, respecting the sovereign rights of both. The report names no other party to those talks.
US Central Command said on July 20 that its forces had helped facilitate the transit of approximately 900 commercial vessels and 450 million barrels of crude oil through the corridor since early May, and that its strikes on Iran were meant to degrade Iran's ability to attack commercial vessels there. Those two accounts of who is keeping the strait open have not been reconciled, and Sunday's briefing does not reconcile them.
