The strait of Hormuz toll is good politics, bad law

A fuel hike, ninety days of dry goods, and the wider context

The episode opens not with the war but with the bill for it. Muzamil notes that fuel prices in Pakistan have just risen by roughly 150 rupees, a historic high, and that public anger is understandable but, in his reading, misdirected. The Pakistani government, he argues, did not have a choice. There is no money in the reserves to fund a subsidy, and any subsidy granted now would come back to bite within six months, as it did in 2022. “The right critique would not be on the fuel hike,” Muzamil says. “The right critique would be why don’t we have buffers? Why don’t we have any money in the bank?”

He frames the fuel hike as phase one. Plastics, aluminium, helium, and a range of other commodities are already offline, and the second- and third-order effects will roll through the economy over the next six to twelve months. He admits, half-laughing, that he asked Gemini what a family of four in the US should stockpile in case of a COVID-style supply shock and then went out and bought ninety days of dry goods, forty kilos of rice, and canned food. The advice to viewers is the same: prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and do not assume business as usual.

It is into this opening that Muzamil introduces his guest. Yasir Abbas was on the show three or four years ago, is now a PhD researcher and lecturer in international law at the University of Manchester, and was previously the special assistant to the chief minister of Gilgit-Baltistan on law and public policy. The first question Muzamil puts to him is whether the Iran-Israel-US confrontation is simply an ideological war with the US as a wildcard, or something larger working in the background.

Why no single prism explains this war

Abbas’s first move is to refuse a single framework. “The scale and the complexity of this matter is such that there is no one way of looking at it,” he tells Muzamil. The conflict has ideological, economic, and political dimensions, and each of them is being fought at different levels, in different theatres. Where you sit, what your religious identity is, and what your political lineage is all determine which face of the war you see.

Zoom out, and you see an international order rearranging itself around the Middle East. Zoom in, and you see a contest over religious authority, oil reserves, and the control of crucial passages — who will dictate the terms of future economic flows. Russia, China, and what Abbas calls “greater Asia” each have a coherent reading of the same conflict, and each reading is internally logical. “We cannot single out one aspect and say that this conflict is primarily determined by these many factors,” he says. “It is multifaceted.”

The implication, which Muzamil draws out, is that the predictive models people were using have all failed. Anyone expecting Trump to retreat at the first sign of oil-price pain has watched that scenario evaporate. The worst-case scenarios are panning out instead. Muzamil cites a tweet by Pakistan’s former NSA Moeed, warning that if the war does not ramp down within the week, history will write it as World War III.

The war that has already expanded by other means

Abbas does not endorse the World War III framing, but he does not dismiss the question either. His position is more interesting: the war has already expanded — just not militarily. “I don’t see the military expansion of it,” he says, “but I see the economic cost of it already doing the damages that in ordinary circumstances would, war do.” South Asia is feeling the dent. The Strait of Hormuz beneficiaries are feeling the pain. The market is doing the work an army would otherwise do.

His grounds for cautious optimism that the kinetic war will not go global are specific. NATO, which for forty years would jump into a US adventure first and ask questions later, has been openly reluctant. The transatlantic alignment between London and New York has cracked: a British government has, for the first time, publicly called the war illegal. The traditional blocs are not unanimous, and without unanimity there is no machinery for global escalation.

Inside the region, however, the war has already overshot Washington’s plan. Iran struck the GCC. It struck Saudi Arabia. It struck the UAE. These were targets the United States, by its own admission, did not expect Iran to hit, and the air bases and naval hub in Bahrain were exactly where American forces had positioned themselves. “Trump would like to say it was going to be a little incursion,” Abbas observes. “But that little incursion is turning out to be costly.” That, in his reading, is also why he believes Washington will look for an off-ramp rather than escalate: the threshold has already been crossed in ways no one in Washington modelled.

A weaker nation wins by surviving

Muzamil pushes on what victory and defeat actually mean in a war this asymmetric. Abbas offers one of the sharpest lines of the conversation. “A strong nation has to win a war decisively,” he says. “And a weaker nation, in order for it to win, has to survive the war. It does not have to dominate the superpower.”

By that standard, Iran has already won the segment of the war it can win. The regime is intact. The strategic position over the Strait of Hormuz is intact. The asymmetric capability — from its own missile arsenal out to the Houthis at Bab el-Mandeb — is intact. “It’s just a stretch of 35 miles,” Abbas says of Hormuz. “A mighty military like the United States is unable to control or unable to clear the pathway, which is vital for global trade and economy. So it says a lot about a mighty army, but at the same time, its kinetic limitations.”

Muzamil presses further. Could this be a Suez moment for the United States — a trade route the hegemon cannot reopen, a sanctions architecture that loses its bite because Iran can sell oil and gas anyway? Could the perception of American power not survive the gap between intent and outcome? Abbas’s answer is careful. He sees Iran establishing credible deterrence and recognition as a disruptive player that cannot be ignored. He does not see Iran setting up a tollbooth.

Why the Hormuz toll plan dies in court

This is where the international-law lens does its sharpest work. Three days before the conversation, the Iranian parliament’s national security commission approved a plan to charge tolls — payable in Iranian rial, not US dollars — on ships transiting Hormuz. Pakistan was reportedly in discussions about flagging vessels to take part. Muzamil asks whether this is enforceable.

Abbas’s answer is that it serves Tehran beautifully at home and fails everywhere else. “The free navigation is a principle which is recognised by the UN,” he explains. He points to Article 32 of the UN convention and to the Corfu Channel precedent against Albania, where a state was found to have no vested authority to prevent free navigation. “From a domestic consumption perspective, it serves the purpose,” he says. “But from a global navigation perspective, it will not have any legal value.”

When Muzamil asks why this should be any different from the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal — both of which charge tolls and are inherent to their countries’ economies — Abbas distinguishes them cleanly. Suez and Panama are artificial canals; states built them, and states can monetise them. Hormuz is open sea, jointly bordered by Iran, Oman, and parts of the GCC. No single one of the three can act unilaterally without the others. And if the precedent of toll-charging on open-sea straits were ever to hold, “then there will be a Bab el-Mandeb tax, then there will be a Cape of Good Hope tax.” The system would collapse into disarray.

The Hormuz toll, in other words, is a piece of theatre for the Iranian public. It is not an enforceable economic regime.

Pakistan between the devil and the deep sea

Muzamil turns the conversation to Pakistan, and to a posture that confused everyone. One week, the story was that Islamabad was about to side with the Saudis and walk into a war with Iran. The next, Pakistan was helping negotiate with Tehran. There was talk of a US vice-presidential visit. Iranians were calling Pakistanis great. Cargo ships were being discussed.

Abbas’s read is that this looked confused because the compulsions were genuinely contradictory. Pakistan has a defence pact with Saudi Arabia and deep economic ties with the GCC. It has cultural and religious ties with Iran. It has strategic interests with the US, including through the IMF, and a growing rapport between Islamabad and Washington that it needed to capitalise on. More than twenty percent of Pakistan’s population belongs to the Shia school of thought and feels a religious connection to Iran. Any absolute stance would have been detrimental.

What he says next is unusual coming from him. “I would basically appreciate the stance that Islamabad took.” Joining offensive operations against Iran would have been deeply unpopular at home and globally. Stepping back entirely would have exposed weakness to Riyadh, to Tehran, and to Washington. The middle path — bringing parties to the table, defending the GCC’s right to self-defence, condemning aggression on Iran, acting as messenger — was, in his words, “a classic diplomatic move which was rooted in securing your interest first.” Muzamil agrees: nobody was expecting the state to play it this well.

But he sets up the harder question. If Iran does retaliate on Saudi and UAE infrastructure, what choices does Pakistan have left? Abbas’s answer is that the Saudis themselves know the cost of a direct confrontation with Iran is too high — disastrous for their oil resources, their economy, and the GCC brand built on safety, security, and development. He believes a threshold will hold. If it does not, the defence treaty becomes live, and “in either case, it will be terrible for the country.”

A jelly state at the centre of every conflict

The most uncomfortable observation in the conversation is Abbas’s about Pakistan’s own structural limits. Other small or mid-sized countries — Finland, Norway, Switzerland — have built durable diplomatic identities around neutrality and mediation. Pakistan has been at the centre of crucial international junctures repeatedly, from 9/11 to the original opening between Washington and Beijing, and has consistently failed to convert that centrality into leverage.

The reason, he argues, is internal. “We are a jelly state, basically,” he says. “We don’t have the institutional capacity to act in a way that is consistent.” Two provinces have active insurgencies. There is an extremism problem. There is institutional decay. The civil-military question — whether the country is run by civilians, the military, or some hybrid, and what the contours of that hybrid actually are — remains unresolved. The result is that when conflicts settle, nobody remembers what Pakistan did. To raise its leverage, Pakistan needs a credible judiciary, governance, and above all an economy. Without those, it remains an actor that participates and is then forgotten.

Muzamil agrees and pivots to China. The world is deglobalising into blocs. China is Pakistan’s neighbour and largest strategic partner, and the current conflict is, beneath the surface, a US-China contest as much as anything else. The president recently made an unannounced visit to the Chinese embassy. The foreign minister went straight to Beijing after the Gulf trips. China is now mediating between Pakistan and the Afghan government after Qatari and Turkish mediation failed. Should Pakistan, for once, stop hedging?

Abbas’s answer is that the hedge is the right answer, and that, unusually, both Washington and Beijing recognise it. The US does not push Pakistan to take a stance against China the way it pushes other countries, because both capitals know that if pushed, Pakistan would have to choose China. China, for its part, treats Pakistan as a strategic partner and an access point to the larger world rather than as a counter to Washington. The CPEC corridor, the Gwadar question, and the BRI architecture make Pakistan more important to China by the month, especially as the global passages tighten one by one. “Either of the both capitals will ever push Pakistan to take that one linear stance,” he says.

The institution past repair

The conversation closes on the question that Muzamil frames as personal. He and Abbas grew up believing the world functioned as a system, that institutions existed, that there was an ethical code and a moral one. They have watched, in real time, the ICC’s rulings on Gaza produce nothing, and a war on Iran that much of the world has openly called illegal. Will the system survive?

Abbas does not soften his answer. “I personally think that the whole fabric of international law has been ruptured beyond repair, basically,” he says. The abuse of the system has been so brazen that it questions the utility of the set-up altogether. What he sees coming is a pattern of unilateralism: states conducting their affairs on their own security calculations with little regard for the UN, because they have watched the UN behave in the face of core issues impacting humanity. He expects a resurgence in weapons programmes, and more countries seriously considering nuclear capability — because, in his reading, the lesson of the last few years is that a nuclear weapon is the only reliable impediment between a state and destruction.

He expects new regional alignments to take shape, though he is honest that the existing ones — SCO, BRICS — have been notably silent during this crisis and will face their own reckonings. “The biggest casualty of the current crisis will be the further erosion of United Nations legitimacy,” he says.

The image he leaves Muzamil with comes from his classroom. At the University of Manchester, where his students are mostly white — European, Australian, American — there is, he says, a consensus forming among the students passionate about international law. They are studying it “in order to know how useless it is.” When the topic of human rights or international law comes up, there is a sarcastic smile on their faces. “Social media has made it extremely easy for them to determine where a genocide is happening, where international humanitarian law is violated, where sovereignty has been brutally violated.” The students are not interested in academic nuance anymore. They want to say to the world’s face what is actually happening. Abbas calls this an equally positive development.

It is, in its way, the cleanest summary of where the conversation has been for an hour. The fuel hike in Karachi, the missiles over the Gulf, the toll plan in Tehran, the hedge in Islamabad, the silence in Brussels, the smile in a Manchester seminar room — all of them are facets of the same fact. The system that everyone was taught to trust no longer functions, and the people who will run the next one are already in the room, watching.