Arsenio DominguezPosts by

The IMO has launched an operation to evacuate 11,000+ seafarers from the strait, designating two temporary sea lanes (Northern near Iran, Southern through Oman and the UAE) and coordinating Iran, Oman, the UAE, the US and industry. Those are the traffic-management and multi-stakeholder coordination functions a chokepoint authority performs as routine. A global standards body is filling an institution-shaped hole in an emergency, on the very two-bank logic the site has argued for. This post reads the evacuation, and the human throughline from late April.

Approximately 20,000 seafarers are stranded across roughly 2,000 vessels in the Persian Gulf. The ITF has fielded 1,900 assistance requests, repatriated 450 crew, and designated the strait a Warlike Operations Area. The IMO Secretary-General has stated there is no safe transit anywhere in the strait. None of the routine coordination a treaty-backed chokepoint authority would provide currently exists at Hormuz.