Make money doing the work you believe in
Does anyone still think allowing Iran to charge tolls for transit passage through the Strait of Hormuz is a tolerable suggestion?
Iran's latest expectation for its newfound strategy puts to rest any notion that Iran's claims on the Strait are reasonable or tolerable. Now the IRGC wants to charge a fee for not mucking with the undersea data cables running through the passage.
Tasnim, in an article titled “Three practical steps for generating revenue from Strait of Hormuz internet cables,” wrote that submarine fiber-optic cables passing through the strait carry more than $10 trillion in financial transactions each day, but said Iran has been deprived of the economic and sovereign benefits of this critical communications infrastructure because of what it called a traditional view of the strait.
Folks from New York or Chicago will recognize the “protection” racket the IRGC is intimating (“that's a useful data cable you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.”)
Suddenly, the IRGC has decided that the Strait of Hormuz is sovereign Iranian territory, from the seabed on up.
Fars said disruption to the cables for only a few days could cause tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to the regional and global economy.
It said an important part of this communications route passes through the Strait of Hormuz and claimed the cables are legally within an area where Iran can exercise sovereignty, adding that the right of transit passage does not remove that authority.
Under its proposed model for governing the strait, Fars said the passage of undersea cables should require permits and toll payments, while foreign companies should operate under Iranian rules. It also said management, repair and maintenance of the cables could be assigned exclusively to Iranian companies, turning Hormuz into one of Iran’s “digital power” levers.
Little if any of the undersea telecommunications infrastructure in and around the Strait has any Iranian investment behind it. Most of the cable infrastructure in the region was laid by global telecommunications companies such as Tata Communications and Gulf Bridge International—the GBI infrastructure provides Iran one of its international communication junctures at Bushehr. Most of the rest of the cabling moves through what would be considered Omani territorial waters.
As with transit passage across the surface of the Strait, Iran has no claim on the seabed or the cables running across it. These claims of sovereignty have no basis in law, in maritime treaties, or in reality.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was not exaggerating when he referred to the IRGC actions in the Strait as piracy and extortion. That is exactly what they are, and this latest “proposal” puts any remaining doubt about that permanently to rest.
The world is rapidly being brought to a point where the nations of the world, if they wish to sustain the status quo of the maritime trading order which sustains the vast majority of the world's economies, must acknowledge that the time has come for the IRGC-dominated thugocracy that is the Islamic Republic of Iran must be ended. The IRGC has no place in the civilized world, and the civilized world only harms itself by refusing to acknowledge this reality.
