Trump's 'Joint Venture'

On April 7, 2026, hours before announcing a two-week ceasefire with Iran, Donald Trump said something extraordinary. Asked about the Strait of Hormuz during a press availability, he suggested “a joint venture” with Iran for securing it. “It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people,” he added. The president of the United States had just verbally endorsed Iranian co-governance of the world’s most important oil chokepoint.

The remark lasted a few seconds. The diplomatic consequences may last decades.

What Trump Actually Said

The “joint venture” comment came during a wide-ranging exchange with reporters about the ceasefire framework and the broader state of US-Iran negotiations. Trump was characteristically free-associating, bouncing between topics, but the Hormuz comments were not off-the-cuff filler. They came in response to a direct question about the strait’s future.

In the same exchange, Trump said “there won’t be any enrichment” — a flat declaration that Iran would surrender its uranium enrichment program as part of any deal. This directly contradicts Point 3 of Iran’s own 10-point plan, published on April 6, which reserves “the right to peaceful nuclear technology, including enrichment on Iranian soil.”

He also called Iran’s 10-point plan “workable” and said that “almost all” of the points had been agreed in principle. These statements cannot all be true simultaneously. You cannot agree to “almost all” of a plan whose third point guarantees enrichment while also insisting there will be no enrichment.

The contradictions are revealing. They suggest not a settled position but an active negotiation — one in which the president is publicly testing multiple framings to see which ones generate traction domestically and which ones Tehran will accept. The “joint venture” language was either a trial balloon or a genuine conceptual framework. Either way, it was heard in Tehran.

What a “Joint Venture” Would Mean

In business, a joint venture is a specific legal structure: two or more parties pool resources, share governance, divide revenue, and split risk. It is not an alliance. It is not a treaty. It is an ownership arrangement. When Trump used that term, he imported an entire framework of assumptions about how the Strait of Hormuz might be managed.

Applied to the strait, a joint venture could mean several things. At its most modest, it might involve Iran and Oman — the two states whose territorial waters constitute the entire chokepoint — jointly administering passage, with the United States in some kind of advisory or enforcement role. At its most expansive, it could mean a multinational entity that collects transit fees, operates security patrols, and distributes revenue among stakeholders.

Revenue sharing from transit fees is the core of the concept. If ships pay to transit, someone collects the money. A joint venture would determine who gets what share. Joint security patrols — Iran’s navy operating alongside international forces — would provide the enforcement mechanism. The IRGC and the US Fifth Fleet, which have spent four decades shadowing each other through these waters, would become partners.

This arrangement has no precedent in the modern law of the sea. No existing waterway governance model looks remotely like what Trump described. The closest analogies come from history — and they are not encouraging.

Historical Parallels

Every major international waterway has its own governance story, and none of them resemble a joint venture.

The Montreux Convention of 1936 gives Turkey sole governance of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, internationally legitimized by treaty. Turkey sets the rules, Turkey enforces them, and Turkey collects the fees. There is no co-governance. The convention limits what Turkey can do — it cannot close the straits to commercial traffic in peacetime — but sovereignty is singular. This is the closest parallel to what Iran seeks, but it is a single-state model, not a partnership.

The Panama Canal operates under Panamanian sovereignty with a neutrality guarantee. The 1977 Carter-Torrijos treaties transferred control from the United States to Panama, with provisions allowing US military intervention if the canal’s neutrality were threatened. This is sovereign control with a security backstop, not shared governance.

The Suez Canal is the most instructive case. Before Nasser’s nationalization in 1956, the canal was operated by the Suez Canal Company — a joint enterprise that was technically Egyptian-chartered but functionally controlled by British and French shareholders. The company collected tolls, maintained the waterway, and distributed dividends. Egypt received a modest royalty. This is, in structure, the closest thing to a “joint venture” that has ever governed a major waterway.

Nasser nationalized the canal precisely because the joint-venture model was perceived as colonial exploitation. The British and French had structured the company to extract maximum revenue while leaving Egypt with the appearance of participation and the reality of subordination. When Egypt took it back, the world order shifted.

There is one more model worth considering: the condominium, in which two states share sovereignty over a territory. The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan operated under this framework from 1899 to 1956. The New Hebrides (modern Vanuatu) was jointly administered by Britain and France. These arrangements were colonial artifacts, unstable by nature, and every single one eventually collapsed. If Trump’s “joint venture” is a condominium by another name, the historical record is clear: they do not last.

Why Trump Might Actually Mean It

The temptation is to dismiss the “joint venture” comment as vintage Trump improvisation — a businessman reaching for familiar language in an unfamiliar domain. That reading may be wrong.

Trump is fundamentally transactional. His worldview centers on deals, and deals require something each side can point to as a win. A joint venture that generates revenue fits this framework perfectly. Iran gets international legitimacy for its toll claim. The United States gets a seat at the table. Revenue flows to both parties. The deal has numbers attached to it — and Trump likes numbers.

He has repeatedly praised business relationships with adversaries. The Trump Organization pursued a Moscow tower project while Trump was running for president. He has spoken admiringly of deals with Saudi Arabia, with China, with entities that other presidents would have kept at arm’s length. The notion that the United States might enter into a commercial arrangement with Iran over a waterway is not ideologically alien to this president. It is how he thinks.

A joint venture would also let the administration claim credit for “solving” the Hormuz crisis without the costs and risks of a military operation. The Navy’s mine countermeasure capability gap — documented extensively in Part 2 of this series — makes a forced reopening of the strait uncertain at best. The Avenger- class minesweepers are 30 years old, the replacement program is behind schedule, and the fleet has exactly four operational mine countermeasure vessels in the entire Fifth Fleet area of operations. A negotiated arrangement sidesteps this vulnerability entirely.

If the military option is uncertain and the status quo is untenable, a deal becomes the path of least resistance. And Trump has never been allergic to the path of least resistance when it comes wrapped in the language of winning.

Why It Would Be Catastrophic for US Allies

Whatever its appeal to a deal-oriented president, a joint venture over the Strait of Hormuz would send shockwaves through every American alliance in the region and beyond.

Start with the Gulf Arab states. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar export the majority of their oil and LNG through Hormuz. Under a joint-venture model, they would be paying tolls to Iran — their primary regional adversary — and to the United States, which is supposed to be their security guarantor. The absurdity of paying your protector to co-manage a toll booth with your enemy would not be lost on Riyadh or Abu Dhabi.

Israel would view any arrangement that legitimizes Iranian presence near Gulf shipping lanes as a strategic loss of the first order. Israel has spent decades working to isolate Iran diplomatically and constrain its regional influence. A US-Iran joint venture over Hormuz would reverse that trajectory overnight. It would signal that Washington considers Iran a legitimate partner in regional security — the opposite of everything Israeli strategic doctrine has pursued since 1979.

Japan, South Korea, and Europe depend heavily on oil transiting Hormuz. Japan imports roughly 90 percent of its crude through the strait. South Korea is similarly exposed. European refineries, already stressed by the loss of Russian pipeline gas, cannot absorb further supply disruption. For these nations, a joint venture would institutionalize their vulnerability — converting a crisis into a permanent toll regime managed in part by one of the belligerents.

And then there is the precedent. If Iran can successfully monetize a natural strait by asserting sovereignty and collecting fees, what stops Indonesia from doing the same at the Strait of Malacca? What stops Yemen and Djibouti from imposing tolls at Bab el-Mandeb? What stops Denmark from reinstating the Sound Dues it abandoned in 1857? The entire post-1945 order of free maritime navigation rests on the principle that natural waterways cannot be toll-gated by coastal states. A US-endorsed joint venture at Hormuz would demolish that principle.

The Accidental Validation

This is the section where the diplomatic damage becomes irreversible, regardless of what Trump meant.

Iran’s April 6 framework — the 10-point plan analyzed in Part 4 of this series — demands controlled passage through the strait with Iranian coordination and war reparations collected through transit fees. This is the single most consequential ask in the entire document. Everything else — sanctions relief, nuclear rights, reconstruction funds — is negotiable. Sovereignty over the strait is the prize.

Trump’s “joint venture” comment effectively acknowledges the premise of that demand. You do not propose a joint venture with a party that has no standing. The very act of suggesting shared governance concedes that Iran has a governance role to play. Whether Trump intended this concession is irrelevant. The words were spoken by the president of the United States, on camera, and they cannot be unsaid.

Iran will cite this framing for years. It will appear in diplomatic communiqués, in UN speeches, in state media. Tehran’s negotiators will point to the American president’s own words as evidence that the United States recognizes Iran’s sovereign interest in the strait. Even if the State Department issues a clarification, even if Vance walks it back at the Islamabad talks, the original quote will outlive every correction.

There is precedent for this dynamic. When Trump said “we fell in love” about Kim Jong Un during the North Korea summits, Pyongyang used the quote in propaganda for years. When he praised Xi Jinping’s handling of COVID in early 2020, Beijing replayed the clip long after Trump reversed course. Presidential words, once spoken, become diplomatic facts. They cannot be recalled.

The “joint venture” comment is more consequential than either of those examples. It touches sovereignty, international law, and the governance of a waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil flows. The quote will appear in Iranian textbooks.

The April 10 talks in Islamabad — Ghalibaf for Iran, Vance for the US — will test whether “joint venture” was a throwaway line or an actual framework. If the US proposes any revenue-sharing mechanism, Iran wins the framing war. If it walks it back, Trump loses credibility with Iran’s negotiators. Part 7 of this series examines how Pakistan displaced Oman as the mediator and what it means for the talks.