Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed on Friday that Iran is operating a selective access system in the Strait of Hormuz — a toll road in all but name, administered by a government that has spent four weeks bombing the same region it is now charging to transit. [1]

The paper reported on March 27 that Iran's selective access system was built to survive Tangsiri's removal.

Malaysia is one of the countries that has received access. [2] The mechanism involves Chinese intermediary companies that process payments in yuan. [3] This is not a neutral financial arrangement: it places Chinese state-adjacent entities at the center of the Hormuz transit economy and removes dollar-denominated transactions from the equation entirely.

The question of who else has access is not answered by any public statement. The countries that have not received access — and whose vessels have been turned back or attacked — are also not publicly named. The selectivity creates an information asymmetry that serves Iran and damages its adversaries: shipping companies cannot plan routes, insurers cannot price risk, and the American government cannot assemble a coherent response to a system it claims is illegal but cannot prevent.

The toll system has been operational for approximately three weeks. Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs dispatched a letter to the United Nations asserting the strait remains open for navigation — the same letter that accompanied the deployment of at least a dozen naval mines. [4] Both postures are official Iranian policy simultaneously: open for transit, mined for deterrence. The mines have not been removed. The toll is still being collected. The ships that pay go through. The ships that do not pay do not.

The 95% traffic collapse reported by Iranian state media is consistent with a functioning toll system, not a closure. [5] The traffic that remains is either toll-paying or state-directed. The traffic that has disappeared is everything else.

-- PRIYA SHARMA, Delhi