Donald Trump stood at a police academy podium in Garden City, New York, on Friday and described a map that exists nowhere. After we finish defeating Iran, he said, pretty soon I'll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States, adding that the strait is essentially already American because we have the blockade and no ships get through unless we want them to. [1] Al Jazeera published a Sunday explainer asking the obvious follow-up question, can he, and collected the lawyers' answers. [1]
Saturday's major recorded Tehran's answer first, when the paper noted that Iran says Hormuz stays Iranian in three tenses at once. The legal file is where the two claims part company.
What international law says
Sovereignty does not exchange hands over a unilateral presidential proclamation. Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, told Al Jazeera that a treaty ratified by the Senate or an act of Congress is constitutionally required to annex territory, citing the Louisiana Purchase, Hawaii, the Panama Canal, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and warned that proceeding anyway would constitute the crime of aggressive war under the UN Charter. [1]
Natalie Klein, an international law specialist at the University of New South Wales, offered the only theory under which the claim acquires any plausibility: occupation authority comparable to America's postwar administration of Japan, which would require military control of Iran or at least its coastline. [1] That is not a legal argument for annexation. It is a description of a much bigger war.
Geography is less negotiable than either man. Under UNCLOS, coastal states hold sovereignty out to twelve nautical miles, and ships enjoy transit passage through international straits that shall not be impeded. At its narrowest point Hormuz is about twenty-one nautical miles wide, so Iran's and Oman's territorial seas overlap across it and there is no water left over for a third owner. Neither Washington nor Tehran has ratified the convention, but its rules on straits are widely treated as customary law binding both. [1]
Iran's deputy foreign minister Kazem Gharibabadi put the same point in political terms on Saturday: the Strait of Hormuz cannot be seized by tweet, nor by aircraft carrier, nor by issuing an order, nor by an election speech, and has been, is, and will remain Iranian. [1][2]
Why the claim keeps working anyway
Paul Musgrave of Georgetown University in Qatar told Al Jazeera that Trump makes such statements primarily for a domestic audience, that the president is a showman who should be taken seriously in some cases but not literally, and that physically and legally impossible is exactly what this case is. [1] The audience metrics agree with him. Barely 35 percent of Americans approve of the war, US reporting describes shortages of Patriot interceptors, petrol averages above four dollars a gallon, and Vice President JD Vance has said controlling pump prices, not Iran's nuclear program, is now the administration's top priority in the conflict. [1] A territory boast costs nothing at that exchange rate.
What the boast does do is obscure the one American position in the strait that is real and operative. The naval blockade continues, CENTCOM counts redirected vessels by the dozen, and Friday brought the third attack on an ADNOC vessel in less than a week. [1][3] Trump is wrong about ownership and uninterested in being right, because the blockade lets him behave like an owner while claiming one.
The June memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran expires on Sunday, and the explainer notes no end to the war is in sight. [1] A dead treaty will not be mourned by a president who treats the waterway as an inheritance. The paper's Saturday position stands: two ownership claims share one thin table, and neither of them is America's. What changed on Sunday is only the paperwork piling up against the claim, from Fein's constitutional memo to Klein's occupation test to a convention neither side signed. A legal explainer is not a lane. Neither is a proclamation.
-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington