When the Iran war ends, the United States and Israel will declare victory and move on. Iran will likely do the same. It will frame the airstrikes on Kharg Island, the destruction of Iranian naval assets, and the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as the price it paid for standing up to U.S.-Israeli aggression. But airstrikes and destroyed naval assets will not address the economic damage Iran has absorbed. Tehran will be left with shattered infrastructure, an economy in freefall, and a political class that needs to show its population that it has extracted something tangible from the war.

Most of Tehran’s demands to end the war are maximalist, as are Washington’s right now. One of Iran’s demands may be achievable if structured correctly: the right to operate the Strait of Hormuz as a tolled waterway, in formal partnership with Oman.

When the Iran war ends, the United States and Israel will declare victory and move on. Iran will likely do the same. It will frame the airstrikes on Kharg Island, the destruction of Iranian naval assets, and the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as the price it paid for standing up to U.S.-Israeli aggression. But airstrikes and destroyed naval assets will not address the economic damage Iran has absorbed. Tehran will be left with shattered infrastructure, an economy in freefall, and a political class that needs to show its population that it has extracted something tangible from the war.

Most of Tehran’s demands to end the war are maximalist, as are Washington’s right now. One of Iran’s demands may be achievable if structured correctly: the right to operate the Strait of Hormuz as a tolled waterway, in formal partnership with Oman.

This is not a fantasy. Iran’s parliament is already debating legislation to collect transit fees from ships passing through the world’s single-most important maritime chokepoint. Since mid-March, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has turned the strait into a de facto toll booth, collecting fees in exchange for safe passage. According to Bloomberg  at least two vessels had paid in yuan as of early April, with one transit brokered through a Chinese maritime services intermediary; vessel tracking data show transits have increased since, though the total paying in yuan remains a small fraction of pre-war traffic. The mechanism exists, but would a postwar Iran have the diplomatic wherewithal to formalize it?

The legal terrain is complicated but not insurmountable. Under international law, the entire width of the strait at its narrowest point consists of the overlapping territorial seas of Iran and Oman, with no high seas’ corridor between them. Iran cannot unilaterally charge a toll on ships hugging the Omani coastline. However, a bilateral Iran-Oman transit authority would eliminate the legal ambiguity. Oman gets a revenue stream and more strategic relevance. Iran gets legitimacy, cash, and something to show its people it achieved during the war. Ships get a predictable process instead of IRGC commanders deciding by whim who passes, who doesn’t, and an unpredictable pricing mechanism.

The Suez Canal model is the relevant precedent. Egypt collects more than $9 billion annually from a canal it owns outright as sovereign infrastructure and operates through a national authority. Washington will resist any arrangement that gives Iran economic authority over the Strait, since freedom of navigation is a core U.S. naval doctrine and the Strait is an international waterway. But the Suez example shows the United States can tolerate tolls when the alternative is permanent chaos.

And it’s difficult to imagine any situation short of the Islamic Republic’s collapse whereby Tehran doesn’t retain some form of control of the Strait as an insurance policy against persistent U.S. and Israeli attacks in the future. That control rests on Iran’s demonstrated capacity to attack, board, or deny passage to vessels. This is a coercive threat that requires no formal legal authority to be effective. The question is not whether Iran can extract a fee but whether it can negotiate the institutional form that makes it durable.

The numbers justify the effort. From 2023 to 2025, roughly 20 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas and 25 percent of seaborne oil trade passed through the Strait of Hormuz annually. Even a modest transit fee of $500,000 per vessel, well below current war risk insurance premiums, applied to the 2,600 monthly transits of normal traffic would generate more than $1.5 billion per month. Annualized, that is a reparations stream dwarfing anything the Trump administration would ever offer Iran.

Then there is the currency question, and here Iran has a chance to make a diplomatically shrewd move to appeal to U.S. President Donald Trump’s mercantilist instincts. The yuan payments brokered during the crisis were for tactical reasons to poke a finger in the eye of Washington, and after the war, Tehran should pivot into a financial mechanism that serves its long-term interests. Iran should not deepen its dependency on Chinese financial infrastructure. It should rejoin the global economic system on terms that give it stability and credibility. That means U.S. dollars.

A transit authority that denominates fees in dollars does something almost no one in Washington would expect from Tehran: It actively reinforces petrodollar supremacy at the very moment when dollar-denominated energy trade faces its greatest geopolitical test in 50 years. Saudi Arabia has flirted with yuan oil sales. Russia has settled exports in rubles after its invasion of Ukraine. China has methodically built alternative settlement infrastructure.

An Iranian-Omani toll authority insisting on a dollar payments plan at the throat of 20 percent of global energy trade—and keeps it there permanently—is huge backdoor concession to Washington, and Iran should proclaim it loudly in the negotiations. Trump and his treasury secretary would be pleased and could sell it at home.

Iran cannot run a toll booth in a neighborhood actively trying to burn it down. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates will view a formalized Iranian transit authority as an existential provocation. Tehran knows this, and that is precisely the leverage it should use, not to extort but to negotiate a parallel nonaggression and noninterference framework with the Gulf states.

This framework envisions the transit authority as one element of a broader postwar settlement, not a unilateral Iranian offer to the Gulf. The sequencing matters: a ceasefire and preliminary U.S.-Iran talks would need to create the political space first. Washington’s role in the establishment of a transit authority would be as guarantor, in exchange for the dollar denomination and the petrodollar reinforcement it provides. Without at least tacit U.S. acquiescence, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, whose security ultimately depends on Washington, would have little incentive to engage and every incentive to spoil.

The terms of the offer to the GCC would be straightforward: Iran fixes fees transparently, guarantees unimpeded passage for GCC energy exports, and denominates every transaction in dollars. In exchange, the GCC commits to noninterference in Iranian domestic affairs, ends support for Iranian opposition groups operating from Gulf soil, and pledges nonaggression. No proxy warfare, no destabilization campaigns, no hosting of military operations targeting Iran.

GCC states that have suffered damage from Iran’s attacks could also work out a formula with Tehran whereby a portion of toll revenues flows toward their reconstruction compensation. This would be a built-in reparations mechanism that avoids the political theater of a formal claims process.

The dollar denomination is what should bring the GCC to the table. Gulf sovereign wealth funds are dollar-denominated, and Gulf central banks hold dollar reserves. A dollar-settled Iranian-Omani toll authority is, paradoxically, more compatible with GCC financial interests than a yuan-settled one. It keeps the monetary architecture familiar to all even as the political arrangement is uncomfortable.

The transit authority doesn’t just become a reparations mechanism but a regional security architecture. Iran stops being the arsonist and gains a financial stake in keeping the region stable—a raison d’être to behave properly. The GCC gets contractual certainty over its export routes. Washington gets petrodollar reinforcement dressed as a peace dividend. Beijing gets energy supply security even if it does not get yuan internationalization (something Washington wasn’t going to be comfortable with anyway). There is something here for everyone.

The alternative is that Iran accepts a cease-fire, gets nothing formalized, and watches oil prices normalize while sitting amid destroyed ports with no mechanism to extract value from a global economy that just spent a month paying $120 a barrel because of what Tehran controls. It’s difficult to imagine Iran not leveraging its newfound muscle on the strait again in protest.

The tollbooth that Iran has built as a response to the U.S.-Israeli attack could, with the right architecture, become the most consequential piece of postwar economic statecraft the Middle East has seen since Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized Suez in 1956. Tehran needs to decide whether it wants the satisfaction of having closed the Strait of Hormuz or the revenue from running it.