A Proven Blueprint, an Uncertain Partner
The numbers come first. The Strait of Hormuz carries an estimated 20% of the world's oil trade, and every week it stays closed is a week that shipowners, insurers, commodity traders and financiers sit on their hands. John Denton, secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), wants to change that calculus — fast.
The ICC, which represents more than 170 countries, has helped develop a neutral governance framework for the Gulf modeled directly on the Black Sea Grain Initiative it helped broker after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Denton told Fortune the mechanism is 'ready to be deployed in a matter of weeks, if not sooner.'
How the Mechanism Would Work
The proposed framework would establish a dedicated task force led by Jorge Moreira da Silva, Executive Director of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), with representatives from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Maritime Organization (IMO).
At its operational core sits a Joint Co-ordination Center (JCC), to be located in Salalah on the coast of the Arabian Sea in southern Oman. The JCC would meet daily to review verified requests from vessels, provide deconflicted routes through the Strait for inbound and outbound traffic, oversee the loading of fertilizer and related raw materials, and publish weekly activity reports. Vessel inspections would not be compulsory, but member states could request a secondary inspection conducted by Oman's Salalah Port Authority and observed by UN monitors.
The initial focus is fertilizers and related raw materials — a deliberate echo of the Black Sea deal's logic. 'The logic behind that deal was an exchange of incentives,' Denton explained. 'Ukraine gained the ability to move wheat and sunflower products, while Russia gained the ability to move fertiliser. Whereas, at the moment, what we're seeing with the Iran conflict is that the only way of exchanging incentives is escalation, which is not going to get us to a peaceful reopening of Hormuz.'
Like its Black Sea predecessor, the mechanism would be time-bound and would explicitly not 'derogate from any freedom of navigation rights under customary or conventional international law,' according to Denton.
The Hard Part: Consent
Denton was candid about the obstacle. 'This isn't something we can impose,' he said. 'Its implementation depends on the parties to the conflict reaching the view that it is a worthwhile initiative and agreeing to move ahead.' He added that he did not know whether Iran would agree, though he confirmed Tehran is aware of the proposal.
Article 5 of the U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding — designed as a confidence-building measure to restore commercial shipping — has instead emerged as the primary sticking point, with vague wording generating competing interpretations. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz involves a web of states with competing territorial claims that makes the two-party Black Sea negotiation look straightforward by comparison. For reference, the Malacca mechanism covering straits in East Asia — often cited as a Hormuz reference point — took three years to negotiate.
The Market Is Already Pricing the Uncertainty
Capital rewards clear rules, and right now the rules governing one of the world's most critical chokepoints are anything but clear. The ICC's framework is technically sound, institutionally credible and, by Denton's account, deployable. The bottleneck is political will, not engineering.
For free-enterprise advocates, the lesson is familiar: when sovereign actors weaponize trade routes, the entire economic ecosystem — shipowners, seafarers, insurers, port handlers, commodity traders, financiers — pays the price in paralysis. A neutral, rules-based corridor backed by the UN and administered from Omani soil is not a geopolitical concession; it is the minimum infrastructure that commerce requires. The sooner all parties recognize that, the sooner the market can do what it does best.
