The zone that arrives before the map
Mohsen Rezaei told Iran's state broadcaster on Sunday that Tehran plans to announce an exclusion zone outside the Strait of Hormuz. The boundary he described begins at the line of the US naval blockade, extends toward the strait and continues into the Persian Gulf. Any ship that enters the area intending to transit the strait and is identified will, Rezaei said, be placed on Iran's sanctions list. There is no date for the announcement beyond the coming days and weeks, and no clarity on where the blockade line runs.[1]
The instrument on the other side has already been counted. The US military says more than 20 warships support the blockade, which as of Sunday had redirected 92 commercial ships and disabled three. That is enforcement that reaches the hull. The only enforcement tool named for Rezaei's zone is a list, and a list reaches the charter contract and the insurance policy rather than the hull. For a shipowner that distinction decides which line of the ledger the risk lands on.[1]
On 24 August this column argued that Iran had turned passage through Hormuz into a permission administered at the charter contract rather than at sea. The exclusion zone carries the same instrument from a list of vessels to a stretch of water. The logic of the tool does not change; its reach does. But until the boundary is drawn and an administering authority is named, that widening does not become something an underwriter can price.[1], [3]
Ankara reaches for a similar instrument
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan announced this week that Turkey is working on a plan to ensure safe passage for commercial shipping in the Black Sea, and said he is in touch with both Ukraine and Russia. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed that he raised the issue with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of a gathering of regional leaders in Kyrgyzstan. In August Ukraine offered a ceasefire covering commercial shipping, and Moscow rejected it, saying it wanted a broader deal.[2]
Here the cost is already on the books. The international grain broker Can Atbasoglu says grain prices have risen by as much as 30 percent. At Istanbul shipyards, idle vessels run up to 50,000 euros a month for their owners in mooring and crew expenses; one ship's superintendent described taking on no cargo because of the risk and sitting in the yard for 50 days. Those three figures set out what a safe-passage arrangement would be trying to win back.[2]
The two cases share one constraint: neither Tehran nor Ankara controls the water it proposes to regulate. Rezaei's zone starts outside a line drawn by the US blockade; Fidan's plan depends on the consent of two parties still attacking shipping. In both, the named instrument binds a third party, the shipowner and the insurer, rather than the adversary's navy. Huseyin Bagci of Middle East Technical University, warning that Turkey cannot solve this problem alone, is naming the same constraint in the Black Sea. An alternative reading is available: each announcement may be intended to produce leverage at a negotiating table rather than enforcement, in which case leaving the boundary undrawn is a choice rather than a gap.[1], [2]
Which signal would test this?
At Hormuz the test is clear. If Iran publishes a boundary with coordinates and names the authority that will operate the list, the announcement becomes a rule an underwriter can turn into a premium. Until those two elements are published, the cost sits in risk perception rather than in a policy, and the question in front of a shipowner stays the chance of being identified rather than the price of passage.[1]
In the Black Sea the test is whether Moscow accepts the narrow arrangement it rejected in August. Without that acceptance, exports keep moving along the path Atbasoglu describes, through Baltic ports and through Romania and the Danube, at a lower pace. The arrangement Turkey built with the United Nations in 2022 held for a year; this time the bargaining is less about the grain itself than about making the ships insurable again.[2]