For 46 years, the United States styled itself as the ultimate guarantor of maritime freedom, and nowhere was this posture more rigidly enforced than in the Persian Gulf . Today, with the Strait of Hormuz closed to dollarized trade , the Department of State continues to issue the orthodox demand that Iran keep the strait open and toll free. “The Iranians are threatening that they are going to set up some permanent system in the Straits of Hormuz where they get to decide who goes through international waterways,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “That will never be allowed to happen.”
This expectation was, historically, backed by the moral weight of international law. But under President Donald Trump, that ground has shifted beneath our feet. The rules-based international order , a system America largely built and championed after World War II, was predicated on the belief that global maritime and trade norms were foundational, applying equally to the weak and the strong. In the Middle East, memories of the Suez Crisis , combined with the threat of Soviet influence in the Persian Gulf, precipitated the creation of the Carter Doctrine to ensure this framework was upheld. The tanker wars of the 1980s challenged this doctrine, but the U.S. and Iraq emerged victorious, and, following a few years of international fighting, the United Nations’ “ Law of the Sea ” was finally instituted in 1994. (The U.S. never joined the convention underlying this legal framework, but previous administrations have accepted it as part of customary international law.)
Under Trump, however, status quo international agreements are being cast aside the moment they constrain his political impulses. When the U.S. telegraphs to the rest of the world that its zero-sum economic interests supersede international law, countries like Iran take note . They know that the U.S. cannot credibly weaponize the rhetoric of international law in the Persian Gulf, while undermining it in the Western Hemisphere . In recent congressional hearings, a Department of Defense official delivered frank testimony confirming that the U.S. coordinated with Panamanian authorities to push Chinese companies away from the Panama Canal, securing “a major victory for unfettered U.S. commerce and a strategic win for the United States.” Fearing the strategic implications of Beijing’s commercial footprint in the Americas, Washington did not turn to international tribunals. Instead, it invoked the Donroe Doctrine , asserting a unilateral right to squeeze out foreign influence and command control over a global maritime chokepoint simply because it sat in America’s “backyard.” The U.S. has recently used similar tactics in Chile , in response to a joint Chinese telecommunications project. One could argue that, from a defensive standpoint , the Pentagon’s logic is sound. But the diplomatic hypocrisy is staggering. America under Trump has asserted de facto ownership and exclusionary control over regional shipping infrastructure to box out a geopolitical adversary, under legal pretexts that are quite thin, to put it mildly. If Washington feels justified in purging Chinese-operated ports at Balboa and Colón to secure its own hemisphere, by what coherent legal or moral standard can it insist to Tehran that the Persian Gulf is an international commons? The fallout from this hypocrisy will not stay confined to the Middle East. By establishing the precedent that global chokepoints can be managed as regional assets, Washington is handing Beijing a blueprint in the Indo-Pacific.
Consider the Strait of Malacca, the narrow waterway through which roughly a third of global shipping and the vast majority of China’s energy imports flow. For years, the U.S. has forcefully pushed back against China's territorial claims in the South China Sea, insisting that international law guarantees freedom of navigation through these vital Asian trade corridors. But if the rules-based order is replaced by a system where the nearest regional hegemon dictates the terms of maritime access, China has every incentive to apply the Panama Precedent to its own “backyard.”
Domestically, the death of the Law of the Sea would mark the end of the Carter Doctrine and the petrodollar system that underwrote it.
Proclaimed in 1980, the Carter Doctrine declared that the U.S. would use military force to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf, acting as a guarantor for the free flow of oil for the global economy. This allowed countries like Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar to emerge as major players , and provided countries like China the cheap energy inputs they needed to industrialize . But that era is now over, and its demise appears to be, astonishingly, the result of America’s own actions. The Carter Doctrine did not fail for lack of missiles and radar system s . It did not fail because of a diplomatic revolt by Middle Eastern allies. It did not fail because of geoeconomic miscalculations that weakened the value proposition of American capital in the Persian Gulf. It did not even fail because of America’s ballooning sovereign debt , which finances the whole enterprise. It ultimately failed because Trump preferred to play a game of zero-sum territorialism instead of engaging in international leadership via U.N. channels. America must grapple with the multipolar reality it engineered. Now that Trump has established a new global norm, treating global chokepoints like the Panama Canal as outposts to be policed, purged, and tolled, the international community must be prepared to accept Iran applying that same logic to the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. chose its path in Panama and Iran, and now the rest of the world is stuck dealing with the consequences in the Persian Gulf.