A few months ago, a reader of mine said something that made me take pause.

“You've got some good ideas,” they said, “but you're angry.”

I kept thinking about it.

I write about international and constitutional law and when I discuss what a state can or cannot lawfully do, I'm not presenting my personal ideas about how the world ought to work. I'm talking about a body of law that already exists.

That distinction apparently isn't as obvious as I thought.

What struck me was that the reader seemed to interpret criticism of American conduct as anger towards America.

But those are not the same thing.

If I say that an action violates international law, I am not saying that because I hate Americans. I'm saying it because I believe international law applies to Americans.

That shouldn't be controversial.

Perhaps the problem is that the United States has spent so long occupying such an unusually dominant position in international affairs that some Americans have come to experience the application of international law to their country as an accusation.

It isn't.

International law does not ask whether Washington approves of it.

It doesn't become more or less valid depending on who is violating it.

It doesn't cease to exist because a country finds a particular rule inconvenient.

And when people outside the United States point this out, that doesn't necessarily mean they're angry with America.

Sometimes we're not angry at all.

Sometimes we're simply looking at the same rules and reaching the conclusion that the United States is incorrect.

That is a profoundly different thing.

There is also something rather revealing about the assumption that criticism must be motivated by hostility.

It suggests that the critic's emotional state is more important than the substance of the criticism.

But the law doesn't care whether I'm angry.

Neither should you.

I'm not shouting. I'm reading the rules.

The relevant questions are:

What happened ?

What law applies ?

What obligations did the parties have ?

What rights did they possess ?

And what are the consequences when those rules are breached ?

-

Those questions don't belong to America.

They belong to everyone.

Perhaps after 250 years, that belief has become so deeply embedded that America can no longer recognise the difference between being powerful and being entitled; between asserting a position and having the law on its side; between what it believes the world should be and what the world actually is.

The United States is one country among almost two hundred.

Its population is a small fraction of humanity - roughly 4%.

As American power becomes increasingly degraded and overextended, Washington is attempting to impose its will beyond its lawful authority.

But power cannot rewrite international law, and the international legal order may ultimately prove more durable than American power.

And that is perhaps the thing that is hardest to communicate from outside the American frame:

The rest of the world does not need to hate America in order to disagree with America.

We can simply believe that the law applies to it too.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

buymeacoffee.com/aussiefemmebot

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

This case study is the work of an independent legal commentator writing in the real-time public interest tradition. It draws on the public documentary record of the conflict and its applicable frameworks of international law, and is intended for a general audience rather than a specialist legal one.

On June 18, 2026, Donald Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran at the Palace of Versailles, during a dinner with Emmanuel Macron.

The choice of venue was either oblivious or deliberate - at Versailles, in 1919, the Allied powers had presented a defeated Germany with its bill for the First World War.

Whatever the intention, the symbolism landed with uncomfortable precision, because the document signed in that palace in June 2026 bore a considerable resemblance to a bill presented to a losing party - even if nobody in Washington was prepared to describe it that way.

The American cost of the conflict that preceded that signing: approximately one hundred billion dollars. Fourteen American military deaths. Months of a global oil supply crisis that drove energy prices to levels not seen in decades, destabilised currency markets across Asia, threatened food security in Africa through fertiliser shortages, and inflicted economic damage on countries that had no involvement in the conflict and no ability to prevent it.

In exchange, the United States achieved the reopening of a strait that had been open before the war began, under conditions that Iranian negotiators were already describing as a victory, while the American Congressional response ranged from Seth Moulton's assessment that the deal was "basically a surrender document" to Ted Cruz's characterisation of it as "giving billions of dollars to lunatics."

The puzzle this case study attempts to resolve is not whether the war was wise or just or strategically coherent - the evidence on all three counts is damning enough to speak for itself.

The puzzle is how Iran, facing the most powerful military in the history of human warfare, operating under an economic sanctions regime that had deliberately collapsed its currency, isolated from the global financial system, and subjected to thousands of precision strikes in the opening hours of the conflict, managed to extract financial accountability from the United States without winning a single military engagement.

Because that is what happened.

The Versailles MOU, whatever its precise terms, represents a transfer of financial resources from the United States and its coalition partners to Iran.

The UAE - the most militarily aggressive Arab state in the anti-Iran coalition - had already delivered three billion dollars to Tehran bilaterally before the formal agreement was signed, with total payments under that arrangement ranging between ten and twenty billion dollars according to reporting confirmed across multiple independent sources.

The ICJ compensation case that Iran filed in 2016 remained open and running on its own timeline, entirely independent of anything signed in Versailles.

To understand how this outcome became possible, it is necessary to go back well before the first bomb fell - to the legal architecture that was already in place, the financial precedents already established, and the strategic logic Iran had been developing for years before Operation Epic Fury gave it the opportunity to deploy that logic at full scale.

Part One: The Legal Furniture Already in the Room

International law is not, as it is sometimes characterised in American domestic political discourse, a set of aspirational principles that powerful states may choose to observe when convenient.

It is a body of binding agreements, court decisions, and codified principles that operate independently of whether any given state has chosen to participate in the institutions that enforce them.

The United States has spent decades cultivating the impression that it operates outside this system - that American power is a kind of sovereign exception to the frameworks that bind everyone else.

The Iran case study is, among other things, a demonstration of the limits of that impression.

The court case that was already running

In 2016, a decade before the war began, Iran filed suit against the United States at the International Court of Justice - the highest court in the world for resolving disputes between sovereign nations, located in The Hague, Netherlands.

The case, formally titled ‘Certain Iranian Assets’ (Islamic Republic of Iran v. United States of America), rested on a straightforward legal argument.

The United States had frozen billions of dollars of Iranian money held in American banks, and in doing so had violated obligations it owed to Iran under the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights - a 1955 bilateral treaty between the two countries that predated the Islamic Republic and guaranteed certain commercial and legal protections to Iranian nationals and institutions operating in the United States.

The ICJ ruled in Iran's favour in March 2023.

The United States had violated the treaty.

Compensation was owed.

The two countries were given a negotiating window to agree on an amount, and when that window closed without agreement, the case returned to the court for formal determination of what the United States must pay.

On February 25, 2026 - three days before Operation Epic Fury commenced - the ICJ issued its procedural schedule.

Iran's Memorial, the formal legal submission setting out its evidence and arguments on the question of compensation, was due November 25, 2026.

Three days later, on February 28, the United States and Israel launched their assault.

The timing has generated considerable analytical debate, and this case study does not attempt to resolve whether that proximity was coincidental or causal. What matters for present purposes is the legal consequence of that timing: the ICJ proceeding did not stop.

Court schedules are not subject to veto by the parties to a dispute. Yes, the United States holds a permanent veto in the United Nations Security Council, which gives it the ability to block any Security Council resolution it dislikes.

However, it holds no equivalent power at the ICJ, which operates under its own statute, runs its own proceedings, and has consistently demonstrated - across decades of American displeasure - that it neither requires American cooperation nor ceases functioning when American cooperation is withheld.

Iran went to war with a live court date and a legal team that had spent a decade preparing its arguments.

Washington went to war with a clock already running against it.

The confession under oath

On February 5, 2026 - three weeks before the assault on Iran - United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared before the Senate Banking Committee. He was there to discuss, among other matters, the economic pressure campaign his department had been running against Iran.

His account of that campaign was detailed, satisfied, and explicit.

"What we have done," Bessent told the committee, "is created a dollar shortage in the country. It came to a swift and, I would say, grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. The central bank had to print money. The Iranian currency went into free fall. Inflation exploded. And hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street."

He had made the same remarks, in similar terms, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, where he described the strategy as "economic statecraft" and noted, with apparent satisfaction, that "no shots" had been fired.

The legal significance of these statements would not have been immediately apparent to most of the committee members present, but it was apparent to anyone familiar with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the Geneva Conventions.

The deliberate engineering of conditions calculated to destroy a civilian population's capacity to sustain itself - access to food, medicine, banking, heating, the basic functions of economic life - is collective punishment, a category of conduct prohibited under the laws of armed conflict and potentially constituting a crime against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. Bessent had described exactly this conduct, twice, on the record, in terms that left no ambiguity about intent.

He was not confessing. He was boasting.

The distinction matters legally not at all - in both cases, the statement exists, it is attributed to the official responsible for the policy, and it is available to any prosecutor or tribunal that subsequently wishes to examine it.

The United States, it should be noted, has never ratified the Rome Statute.

This is sometimes cited as insulating American officials from ICC jurisdiction, and it is true that the court's reach is more limited with respect to non-member states than to member states. It is not, however, a complete shield.

The ICC can exercise jurisdiction when crimes are committed on the territory of member states, when crimes are committed against nationals of member states, and when the UN Security Council refers a situation to the court - and 125 states are parties to the Rome Statute, including states whose nationals were caught in the Hormuz closure and whose territory hosted events connected to the conflict.

More immediately relevant to the evidentiary record: Bessent's testimony did not require ICC jurisdiction to become damaging. It became part of the documentary record of the conflict the moment he uttered it, and that record was already being assembled by organisations - the UN Human Rights Council's Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, Human Rights Watch, the Iranian Red Crescent - whose mandate operates independently of any particular court's jurisdiction.

The arrest warrant already outstanding

The third element of legal architecture already in place before the war began concerned not Iran's legal position but Israel's.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The warrant related to his conduct in Gaza, where the court's Pre-Trial Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe he bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the deliberate deprivation of objects indispensable to survival - the international legal term for the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Netanyahu was also found to have directed attacks on civilians.

The warrant was not symbolic. All 125 states parties to the Rome Statute are legally obligated to arrest any individual subject to an ICC warrant who sets foot on their territory.

The consequence was immediate and concrete: Netanyahu could not attend Davos in Switzerland, could not travel to most of Europe, could not visit Canada, Japan, or South Korea without risking arrest.

Israel's co-aggressor in Operation Epic Fury was a sitting head of government already subject to an active international arrest warrant for conduct remarkably similar in character to what would unfold against Iran. The same command authority that the ICC had found reasonable grounds to implicate in the systematic targeting of civilian populations in Gaza was now directing strikes against Iranian civilian infrastructure, Iranian schools, Iranian hospitals, and Iranian residential areas.

From the perspective of building an evidentiary case before the ICC, this was not a complicating factor - it was a gift.

Pattern of conduct evidence is admissible and relevant to existing proceedings.

Every documented strike on an Iranian civilian target added to the record that the Pre-Trial Chamber had already said it was watching.

Part Two: The Opening - What Iran Did and Why It Worked

Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026. In the opening hours, the United States and Israel struck more than nine hundred targets across Iranian territory. Iran's Supreme Leader was killed in the early strikes, along with senior members of the military and intelligence leadership. Nuclear facilities were struck. Infrastructure was destroyed at a pace and precision that reflected decades of targeting planning. By any conventional military measure, the opening phase of the assault was devastating.

Iran could not match this militarily. The United States Air Force, operating in conjunction with Israeli air power and the full suite of American naval assets deployed to the region - three carrier strike groups, guided missile destroyers, amphibious assault ships carrying marines - represented a force that no other country on earth could contest in the air.

The question Iran faced in those first hours was not whether it could win a military engagement but whether military engagement was the right game to be playing at all.

The answer, as Iran's conduct over the following months demonstrated, was largely no.

Iran fought back militarily - it mined the strait, struck Gulf state infrastructure, targeted American bases across the region, and maintained enough defensive capability to make the conflict costly. But the military dimension of Iran's response was instrumental rather than decisive. The real contest was being fought on a different terrain entirely.

The strait as legal argument

The Strait of Hormuz has been described, in decades of American strategic doctrine, as an international waterway - a global commons through which the free flow of energy is a matter of universal interest that the United States has both the right and the responsibility to protect.

This description is geographically and legally inaccurate in ways that had significant consequences once Iran decided to contest it formally.

The strait at its narrowest point is twenty-one nautical miles wide. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea - the foundational treaty governing international maritime law - every coastal state has sovereignty over the waters within twelve nautical miles of its coastline. Iran's coastline runs along the northern side of the strait; Oman's coastline runs along the southern side. Twelve plus twelve is twenty-four. The strait is twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest. The arithmetic produces an unavoidable conclusion: there is no neutral water.

There is no international commons at the centre of the Strait of Hormuz.

Every vessel that has ever transited that waterway has done so in either Iranian or Omani territorial waters, and the claim that the strait is ungoverned international space is precisely the kind of legal fiction that other contexts have already discredited - the same logic, in fact, that Australia's High Court overturned in the 1992 Mabo decision, when it ruled that the doctrine of terra nullius, the colonial principle that land belonging to no single named European owner could be claimed by whoever arrived with sufficient force, was always a lie. The land was never empty. The sovereignty was always there.

Applied to water, in the Strait of Hormuz in 2026, the analysis runs to the same conclusion: the water was never international commons. The sovereignty was always there.

Iran did not “close” the strait. What Iran did was significantly more sophisticated: it distinguished, with considerable precision, between states that were participating in the assault on its territory or supporting it materially, and states that were not. Ships from China continued moving. Ships from India continued moving. Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, Malaysia, and Thailand negotiated access and got their vessels cleared. The Philippines secured a direct assurance from Iran's Foreign Minister that Filipino-flagged vessels and the tens of thousands of Filipino seafarers working across the Gulf would have safe passage.

The transit regime Iran constructed was not indiscriminate - it was the conduct of a state that understood the laws of armed conflict well enough to distinguish between its enemies and the rest of the world, and to offer the latter a commercially rational path through a waterway it had every sovereign right to control.

The commercial terms Iran offered were denominated in Chinese yuan rather than US dollars. This was not merely a financial preference. The arrangement that has governed global oil trade since 1974 - under which petroleum transactions are priced in US dollars, creating permanent global demand for American currency and providing the structural foundation for American deficit spending and military projection - is not a treaty.

It is not international law.

It is a bilateral arrangement struck between Washington and Riyadh in the wreckage of the Nixon administration's decision to abandon the gold standard, extended to the rest of the world by the practical force of American dominance rather than by any agreement anyone else signed.

Iran's transit regime offered the world a concrete, functioning alternative: settle in yuan, coordinate with Iranian authorities, and your ships move. In the first weeks of the conflict, that offer was taken up by dozens of vessels from across the global economy, building a transactional precedent that was simultaneously a financial fact, a legal argument, and a demonstration to the watching world that de-dollarisation was not theoretical.

The public ceasefire as legal document

In late March 2026, Pakistan delivered a fifteen-point American ceasefire proposal to Iranian officials. The proposal asked Iran to dismantle its nuclear program, accept limits on its ballistic missile capabilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and receive sanctions relief in return. Iran rejected it publicly and immediately.

What followed was the move that distinguished Iran's approach from that of every other state that has faced comparable American military pressure in the post-Cold War era: Iran issued its own counter-proposal, in public, through its Foreign Minister, in the explicit language of international law.

The Iranian counter-proposal contained five points.

The first was a halt to attacks and targeted assassinations. The second was the establishment of concrete mechanisms to prevent future aggression. The third was guaranteed war reparations. The fourth was a comprehensive end to the war across all theatres, including Lebanon and Iraq. The fifth was international recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.

This counter-proposal was not a negotiating position in the conventional diplomatic sense - a private set of demands submitted through back channels, softened for public consumption, and held open to revision as talks progressed.

It was a public legal filing. By stating its terms openly, Iran placed them in the documentary record of the conflict, where they could be cross-referenced against the ICJ proceeding, against the developing Article 15 case at the ICC, and against the longer history of US-Iran legal disputes.

The reparations demand, stated in March 2026 as point three of a public counter-proposal, would reappear at Versailles in June 2026 as three hundred billion dollars described as a reconstruction fund - different vocabulary, identical obligation.

Part Three: Building the Evidentiary Record

Legal cases are not constructed in courtrooms.

The courtroom is where finished arguments are presented; the evidentiary record that sustains those arguments is built in the world, in real time, from the moment events occur.

Iran understood this and acted accordingly from the first hours of the conflict, constructing a documentary record that would serve multiple legal purposes simultaneously - the ICJ compensation proceeding, any future ICC referral, bilateral negotiations with coalition partners, and the broader political and diplomatic pressure campaign that runs alongside formal legal processes.

Documenting the harm

On February 28, 2026, the first day of the conflict, a missile struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. The death toll was subsequently established at approximately 165 to 175 people, the majority of them children. The US Department of Defense conducted a preliminary investigation and confirmed that American forces had struck the school. Human Rights Watch, using satellite imagery and video footage, independently verified that the strike had been carried out with highly accurate guided munitions - precision weapons that cannot be explained away as collateral damage from imprecise targeting. Iran's Red Crescent documented the casualties and submitted its evidence directly to the ICC Office of the Prosecutor.

This pattern - Iranian government documentation cross-referenced by independent international organisations - was sustained throughout the conflict.

By March 2026, Iran's Red Crescent had documented more than 6,600 civilian structures struck, including more than 5,500 residential units, fourteen medical centres, and sixty-five schools. More than a hundred American international law professors, legal scholars, and former Judge Advocates General - the senior legal officers of the US military - published an open letter documenting the illegality of the conflict under the UN Charter and identifying specific incidents, including the Minab school strike and the destruction of the Gandhi Hospital, as potential war crimes under both international and domestic American law. These were not Iranian government lawyers making politically convenient arguments. They were American legal professionals staking their professional reputations on their assessments, and their letter became part of the documentary record that any future prosecutor would have available without needing to rely on Iranian sources.

The Hegseth statement of March 13, 2026 added a further layer to that record. In a public address, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that American forces would show "no quarter, no mercy" in prosecuting the conflict.

"No quarter" is a term with a precise meaning in the laws of armed conflict: it refers to the killing of enemy combatants who have surrendered or are no longer capable of fighting. The prohibition on no-quarter orders appears in Article 8 of the Rome Statute as a war crime, and it is separately criminalised under the United States' own domestic law, in 18 U.S.C. § 2441, the US War Crimes Statute. Hegseth made the statement publicly, as Secretary of Defense, in his capacity as the civilian head of the American military. It required no investigative effort to document. It was available on video, in transcript, and in the reporting of every major news organisation within hours of being uttered.

The Article 15 mechanism

Under Article 15 of the Rome Statute, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor is legally required to receive and analyse information on alleged crimes from any source. The operative word is any. Not states, not governments, not accredited legal bodies - any source.

A private citizen with access to publicly available documentation of war crimes can submit a communication to the Office of the Prosecutor, and that communication must be received, logged, and considered.

In April 2026, following Trump's Truth Social post stating "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," which was published approximately ninety minutes before a self-imposed military deadline and constitutes a timestamped, publicly attributed statement of intent by the head of state with command authority over the forces conducting the strikes, an international mobilisation of private Article 15 communications began. The submissions cited the Minab school strike, the Hegseth no-quarter statement, the Gandhi Hospital destruction, the pattern of strikes on civilian infrastructure, and Trump's public statements on oil and regime change - which, under the Rome Statute's framework for the crime of aggression, function as evidence of criminal intent stated openly by the principal. Every communication submitted went into a file. Every file built the record that would be available when Iran filed the jurisdictional declaration that would formally open the court's doors.

Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute permits any state - even a state that has not itself ratified the treaty - to lodge a declaration accepting ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed on its territory from a specified date.

Palestine used this mechanism in 2014.

Ukraine used it twice.

The ICC subsequently issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pursuant to Palestine's declaration. Iran could do the same, and had the benefit of a record already assembled by independent international organisations, private citizens across 125 member states, and American legal experts who had documented the legal violations under their own professional authority.

Part Four: The Financial Architecture

While the legal record was being built, Iran was simultaneously constructing a financial architecture that would give it leverage independent of any military outcome. The two tracks - the legal and the financial - were not parallel but interlocking, each reinforcing the other and each operating on a timeline that the United States could not control.

The toll regime

The Larak-Qeshm corridor - the northern shipping channel running between Qeshm Island and the Iranian mainland - is not, as American strategic doctrine had long implied, part of the internationally recognised transit passage through the strait. The corridor sits entirely within Iran's undisputed twelve-nautical-mile territorial sovereignty. No foreign transit right under any international instrument applies to it. Iran constructed a managed transit regime for this corridor that charged passage fees of up to two million dollars per vessel, required advance coordination with the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, and demanded payment in Iranian rials or Chinese yuan.

The legal basis for this regime was straightforward and the United States, having never ratified UNCLOS, was in no position to challenge it through the treaty framework it habitually invoked when seeking to assert freedom of navigation in others' waters.

A state enforcing a transit regime in its own territorial waters is exercising a right that requires no justification, and the country demanding that it stay open was the same country that had launched an illegal war of aggression against it three weeks earlier. By the time American naval commanders were debating the legal basis for Project Freedom, their allies' shipping companies had already been negotiating with the Persian Gulf Strait Authority for weeks, paying the fees, and moving their cargo.

Oman's parallel role in this architecture deserves attention. The inbound shipping lane - the corridor used by commercial tankers approaching the loading terminals of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and the UAE - runs through Omani territorial waters, under a 1974 bilateral Iran-Oman maritime treaty. In May 2026, while five Gulf Cooperation Council states - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar - sent a joint letter to the International Maritime Organisation warning commercial shipping not to engage with Iran's transit authority, Oman was sitting down with Iranian legal specialists in Muscat to co-draft a bilateral maritime navigation framework. The legal experts writing that framework were not diplomats composing a communiqué - they were technical specialists drafting an instrument that would, once completed, carry the signatures of the only two states with sovereign territory bordering the strait. When that instrument is challenged, as it will be, the challenging party will be confronting a governance document with the co-signature of the state that holds the other half of the waterway.

The rial demand and its strategic logic

The requirement that passage fees be paid in Iranian rials warrants particular examination, because it operated simultaneously on financial, legal, and political levels in ways that the volume of commentary it generated did not always reflect.

At the financial level, the demand was a direct counter to the specific weapon Bessent had described in his congressional testimony. The deliberate creation of a dollar shortage in Iran - the engineering of currency collapse through sanctions - had been the primary instrument of American economic warfare against Iran for years, and had been explicitly described as such by the Treasury Secretary under oath.

Requiring payment in rials for Hormuz transit drove demand for the rial, forced partial recognition of the currency as a legitimate instrument of international commerce, and generated hard currency reserves at the precise moment Iran needed them most. It was, in the most direct sense imaginable, using the strait to reverse the weapon that had been used against the currency.

At the legal level, the demand asserted Iranian sovereignty over the waterway in the most operationally concrete form available. The principle at stake is not abstract: a toll is what a sovereign entity charges for access to infrastructure it controls. It is not what parties with competing claims charge each other in disputed territory, and it is not what a state charges for access to a commons that belongs to no one. By accepting the toll - and hundreds of vessels did - shipping companies and their insuring parties were implicitly accepting the legal premise that Iran had the authority to charge it. That acceptance was not the same as a formal legal concession, but it was a transactional fact, and transactional facts accumulate into precedent.

At the political level, the yuan denomination of the tolls placed every transaction outside the dollar-denominated settlement infrastructure that American financial sanctions were designed to disrupt. China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, which by 2026 connected nearly five thousand banks across a hundred and eighty-five countries, processed these transactions efficiently. The Reserve Bank of Australia had held a currency swap agreement with the People's Bank of China since 2012. The infrastructure for non-dollar settlement was not improvised - it had been growing steadily for a decade, and Iran's toll regime provided it with a new and high-profile institutional application.

The invoice

In April 2026, Iran's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, sent a formal letter to Secretary-General António Guterres and to the President of the Security Council. The letter formally demanded compensation from five Arab states - Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan - on the grounds that each had allowed its territory to be used as a base for the assault on Iran, with some states having participated directly in strikes on Iranian territory.

The legal instrument Iravani invoked was the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, adopted by the UN International Law Commission in 2001. These Articles represent the codification of customary international law on state responsibility - the principles that apply to all states regardless of treaty membership, governing what happens when a state commits an internationally wrongful act. The core obligation is straightforward: full reparation, including restitution, monetary compensation, and satisfaction. The preliminary damage figure Iran placed on record was $270 billion, described as an initial assessment subject to ongoing multi-stage evaluation.

The legal argument was more sophisticated than the dollar figure suggested.

All five named states had, to varying degrees, characterised Iranian retaliatory strikes on their territory as unprovoked aggression, and Bahrain had sponsored a UN Security Council resolution - passed 13-0 with China and Russia abstaining - condemning those strikes. Iran's letter contested the foundational premise of that resolution. Under international law, a state that facilitates an act of aggression against a third party cannot subsequently invoke the right of self-defence against that third party's response.

The legal principle involved is sometimes expressed in Latin - nemo auditur propriam turpitudinem allegans - which translates loosely as the principle that no one may claim protection from the consequences of their own wrongdoing.

A state that opens its territory and bases to an attacking force does not acquire victim status in relation to the country being attacked. The $270 billion demand was also a legal argument about the Security Council's own legitimacy, lodged in the permanent record of the UN at the same time as Bahrain was using the Security Council to condemn the state it had helped attack.

Part Five: The Endgame

By May 2026, the military and legal pressure Iran had sustained for three months was beginning to produce visible effects on the opposing side. Project Freedom, announced by the Trump administration as a humanitarian operation to escort stranded commercial vessels through the strait under American air cover, lasted less than forty-eight hours before being paused at Pakistan's request. In that time, two American-flagged merchant vessels transited the strait - two, against the hundreds Trump had publicly claimed were waiting. The explanation was not military: the United States had the air assets and the naval presence to escort ships.

The explanation was commercial and legal. No marine insurer was prepared to cover a vessel transiting a mined waterway under American air cover while Iran had publicly declared that any vessel participating in US military operations would be treated as a legitimate target. No insurance meant no movement, regardless of what military protection was theoretically available. The operation that was intended to demonstrate American resolve demonstrated instead that military dominance in the airspace above a waterway does not translate to the ability to move commercial shipping through it when the commercial and legal risks make participation untenable.

Reading the board

The strategic position in early May 2026 can be understood by examining what each of the principal actors actually controlled, as distinct from what they claimed to control.

Iran controlled the territory that mattered. The IRGC had published its formal map of the control zone, which encompassed the entire navigable channel between the points where Iranian and Omani territorial waters converge. It had enforced that map with live fire. Ships were transiting under Iranian authority and paying Iranian-denominated fees, building a transactional and legal precedent with every hull that cleared the corridor.

China controlled Iran's economic lifeline and held leverage over both parties. Chinese vessels were moving through the strait under the bilateral arrangement Iran had constructed in the first weeks of the conflict. Chinese yuan was settling Iranian oil transactions. China was buying Iranian oil throughout the conflict, providing the foreign currency income that sustained Iranian capacity to continue, and it was doing so while maintaining enough diplomatic engagement with Washington to retain influence over the eventual settlement.

Pakistan controlled the only functioning communications channel between Washington and Tehran. Every substantive exchange between the two governments ran through Islamabad. Pakistan's Field Marshal Asim Munir had maintained overnight contact with both sides during the most acute moments of the crisis. Pakistan was not a neutral mediator - it had its own interests in regional stability and its own relationships with both Iran and the Gulf states - but its willingness to sustain the back-channel was the structural reason that diplomatic resolution remained possible at all.

The United States controlled the airspace and retained the capacity to resume bombing. What it did not control was the waterway, the financial settlement infrastructure, the legal proceedings, or the diplomatic back-channel. It had military dominance and economic leverage, and had discovered that neither was sufficient to produce the outcome it sought on a timeline it could manage.

Bilateral collection

In June 2026, Reuters reported that the United Arab Emirates had already delivered three billion dollars to Iran in the context of a bilateral arrangement to halt Iranian strikes on Emirati territory, with total payments under the arrangement expected to range between ten and twenty billion dollars. The UAE denied the report categorically. The denial was contradicted by four independent sources cited by Reuters and subsequently corroborated across multiple other outlets.

The UAE was, by any measure, the most aggressive Arab state in the anti-Iran coalition. It had lobbied Washington to continue and intensify the military campaign. Its forces had participated in strikes on Iranian territory. It had deployed Israeli Iron Dome batteries on its soil and hosted Netanyahu for a secret visit during which a joint defence acquisition fund was announced. It had attempted to weaponise Pakistan's debt obligations as punishment for Islamabad's role in hosting mediation talks. The Abraham Accords - the US-brokered normalisation agreements between Israel and Arab states, announced in 2020 as a new architecture for Middle Eastern stability - were premised entirely on the logic that a sufficiently broad Arab-Israeli coalition could contain Iran permanently. The UAE was the most committed and capable partner in that coalition.

Iran sent that partner an invoice. The IRGC visited Abu Dhabi. The talks quickened. The money moved. Iran was reportedly approaching at least two other Gulf Arab states with similar arrangements. The reparations collection was proceeding bilaterally, country by country, outside any formal legal framework and in advance of any formal settlement - a demonstration that Iran had multiple simultaneous collection mechanisms available and was prepared to use whichever produced results fastest.

Versailles and the vocabulary problem

The memorandum of understanding signed at Versailles on June 18, 2026 released approximately twenty-four billion dollars of Iran's frozen assets - money that had been held in foreign financial institutions as a consequence of the sanctions regime and that belonged to Iran in law regardless of the political circumstances surrounding its freezing. The MOU opened a sixty-day window for negotiation of a final settlement, with a figure of three hundred billion dollars circulating in various draft frameworks as the total value of a reconstruction and compensation package. The word reparations appeared in none of the drafts, and it did not appear in the signed document.

Iran’s preliminary damage assessment submitted to the UN in April 2026 placed direct damages at $270 billion. The full claim - encompassing indirect economic harm, the deliberate currency collapse Bessent described before Congress, decades of sanctions damage, and the ongoing ICJ compensation proceeding - runs to figures that analysts following the negotiations have placed as high as one trillion dollars. The Versailles reconstruction fund, whatever its final form, represents not the settlement of that claim but its first instalment.

This omission is the single most legally significant feature of the Versailles agreement, and it is the reason the agreement does not represent the conclusion of Iran's accountability campaign but rather a stage in it.

Reparations are not, under international law, a matter of diplomatic preference or semantic convention. Under the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts - the framework Iran invoked in its April invoice, the framework that underlies the ICJ compensation proceeding, and the framework that any subsequent legal challenge would invoke - a state responsible for an internationally wrongful act is under an obligation to make full reparation for the injury caused. That obligation flows from the character of the act, not from the willingness of the responsible party to acknowledge it.

Whether the payment is described as reparations, as an investment fund, as frozen asset release, or as reconstruction assistance does not alter the legal obligation. It alters only the political cost of making the payment.

Washington had every reason to avoid the word. Reparations carry an implicit admission that the underlying act was wrongful. An investment fund implies a commercial arrangement between equals. Frozen asset release implies a technical matter of sanctions management. Each alternative vocabulary achieves the same financial transfer while avoiding the legal characterisation that would be most damaging across a range of other contexts: the ongoing ICJ proceeding, Iran's claims against the five Gulf states, and the accumulated claims of other countries - Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba - that have their own outstanding grievances against the United States under international law.

The ICJ case remained open. The November 2026 deadline for Iran's Memorial was unchanged. Nothing in the Versailles MOU constituted a waiver of Iran's rights in that proceeding, and nothing Iran's negotiators said publicly suggested any intention of withdrawing from the court. The legal case and the diplomatic settlement were operating on separate tracks, with the legal case functioning as the background condition that gave the diplomatic settlement its financial urgency. If the Versailles process failed to produce adequate compensation, the ICJ would determine what adequate compensation looked like - and a court that had already found the United States in violation of its treaty obligations was unlikely to arrive at a number below three hundred billion dollars.

The distance between the $300 billion reconstruction fund circulating in the MOU drafts and the trillion dollar figure Iran’s legal team regards as the accurate measure of its losses is not an abstraction. Iran has already demonstrated it treats the MOU’s conditions as binding and enforceable instruments, not diplomatic courtesies. When the first condition of the signed agreement was breached, Iran closed the strait again. That is the behaviour of a party with a legal position it intends to collect on in full, and it suggests the sixty-day negotiating window that follows will determine not whether Iran pursues the full claim, but through which mechanism it does so.

Part Six: The Trapdoor - Other Countries With Standing to Follow

The Iran case study does not exist in isolation.

It is the most fully developed example to date of a strategy that other states have been considering, and in some cases partially attempting, for years.

What Iran demonstrated at Versailles is not merely that one country extracted financial accountability from the United States in one conflict. It demonstrated that the legal architecture exists, that it functions under pressure, and that a state with sufficient preparation, patience, and strategic discipline can use it to produce results that military force could not. That demonstration has an audience.

The countries most likely to be studying the Iran playbook carefully are not random.

They share certain characteristics: they have suffered documented harm from American military or economic conduct, they have existing or potential claims before international legal institutions, and they have watched the United States refuse to comply with adverse rulings while assuming that refusal carries no long-term cost. Iran's case suggests that assumption is incorrect, and the states that have been accumulating grievances against the US legal and financial system are now in possession of a working template.

Nicaragua

Nicaragua's claim against the United States is the oldest and in some respects the most straightforward in the ledger. In 1986, the International Court of Justice ruled in Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua that the United States had violated international law by supporting the Contra rebels and mining Nicaraguan harbours. The court ordered the US to pay reparations. The United States responded by withdrawing from the ICJ's compulsory jurisdiction - announcing that it would no longer accept the court's authority to hear cases brought against it without its consent - and simply refusing to comply with the ruling.

That ruling has never been satisfied. Nicaragua has never formally withdrawn the claim. The judgement sits in the permanent record of the ICJ, unexecuted, as the most visible prior example of the United States treating an adverse international court ruling as optional.

What Iran's case demonstrates, four decades later, is that the refusal to comply does not extinguish the obligation - it defers it, while the legal record continues to accumulate and the political conditions for enforcement continue to evolve. Nicaragua has the strongest existing legal precedent of any country in this analysis, a judgment already in its favour from the world's highest court. What it has historically lacked is the leverage Iran possessed - geography that gave it a financial instrument the United States could not ignore. Whether the Iran precedent changes the political calculus around Nicaragua's claim is a question that Managua's legal advisers are certainly examining.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan's situation is structurally different from Nicaragua's but financially more acute. Following the Taliban's return to power in August 2021, the United States froze approximately seven billion dollars of Afghan central bank reserves held in American financial institutions, and subsequently directed half of that amount - $3.5 billion - toward a fund nominally intended for Afghan humanitarian relief, while keeping the remaining $3.5 billion frozen pending resolution of claims by families of September 11 victims against the Taliban.

The legal basis for this seizure is contested in ways that American courts have not fully resolved. The Afghan central bank reserves belong, in law, to the Afghan people - not to any particular government. Freezing them on the basis of political objection to the governing authority is not straightforwardly permitted under the international legal frameworks governing sovereign assets, and the redirection of those assets to a separate fund controlled by American trustees is an even more aggressive assertion of authority over another state's financial resources. Afghanistan does not currently have the institutional capacity to pursue this claim through international legal channels - the Taliban government lacks international recognition, and the legal personality necessary to bring an ICJ case is complicated by that status. But the legal argument that the assets were wrongfully seized does not depend on who governs Afghanistan, and the precedent Iran has established - that frozen assets can be unlocked through a combination of legal pressure, financial leverage, and sustained political campaigning - is directly relevant to whatever governance structure Afghanistan eventually develops that is capable of pursuing the claim.

Venezuela

Venezuela's situation involves a different category of American conduct but an analogous legal structure. The United States has, since 2019, recognised Juan Guaidó rather than Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela's legitimate president - a position that the vast majority of the international community has not sustained - and has used that recognition as the basis for redirecting control of Venezuelan state assets held abroad, including gold reserves held at the Bank of England and assets of the state oil company PDVSA. The Bank of England litigation over Venezuelan gold reserves has been proceeding through British courts, producing conflicting rulings on questions of recognition and sovereign immunity that have not been definitively resolved.

Venezuela's claim differs from Iran's in that the primary legal contest has been in domestic courts rather than international tribunals, and the leverage Iran held through the Strait of Hormuz has no Venezuelan equivalent. Venezuela controls no geography that gives it comparable financial leverage over global trade. What it does have is a documented record of American interference in its domestic political affairs, asset seizures of contested legality, and sanctions that have produced civilian harm documented by UN human rights bodies. The Iran precedent is most useful to Venezuela not as a direct template but as a demonstration that the international legal architecture can be used to extract accountability from the United States when the evidentiary record is sufficiently well-constructed and the political conditions in the broader international community are sufficiently favourable.

Cuba

Cuba's claim is the longest-running in this analysis and the most institutionalised in its presentation. Since 1992, Cuba has presented an annual resolution to the United Nations General Assembly calling for an end to the United States embargo, and since 1999 has presented an annual accounting of the economic damages caused by that embargo to the UN and to international legal bodies. The damage figures Cuba has placed on the record now exceed one trillion dollars, assessed across more than six decades of trade restrictions. The General Assembly resolution condemning the embargo passes every year with overwhelming majorities - in recent years, the vote has been approximately 185 in favour with only the United States and Israel opposed - but General Assembly resolutions are not binding and the embargo has not ended.

Cuba's situation illustrates both the potential and the limitation of the Iran playbook as a template. The legal argument that a decades-long economic embargo causing documented civilian harm constitutes a violation of international law is coherent and has been made persuasively in international forums. The General Assembly voting record demonstrates that the international community's view of the embargo is not in serious dispute. What Cuba has lacked, and what Iran possessed, is a concrete financial leverage point - a geographical or economic asset that gives it the ability to impose costs on the United States that are immediate, measurable, and resistant to military solution. The Iran case study will not change Cuba's geography. What it may change is the strategic imagination of Cuban legal advisers thinking about how to move from a moral and political argument that commands near-universal international support to a legal and financial process that produces material results.

The Elements Iran Had That Others May Lack

Running the Iran playbook requires several conditions that not every aggrieved state can replicate, and it is worth being precise about which elements were specific to Iran's situation and which are genuinely transferable.

The pre-existing court ruling is transferable in principle but requires decades of patient legal work. Iran filed its ICJ case in 2016 and received its ruling in 2023. Nicaragua has a ruling already. Other states would need to identify the applicable treaty framework, file the case, and wait - potentially for years - for a ruling before the legal leverage becomes available. The lesson of the Iran case is that this work should begin long before any crisis makes it urgent, because a court date that already exists when a conflict begins is worth far more than one that has to be initiated under fire.

The geographical leverage is not transferable in the same form but may have functional equivalents. Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz gave it a financial instrument that could not be neutralised by air power. Other states are unlikely to control a waterway through which twenty percent of global oil supply passes. But the broader principle - that legal and financial leverage is most effective when it is grounded in something the opposing party cannot simply bomb away - applies beyond the specific geography. A state's control over critical minerals, rare earth processing capacity, agricultural exports, or other genuinely scarce resources that the global economy depends on can function as an analogous instrument, and the Iran case suggests that deploying such instruments in conjunction with a legal accountability strategy produces results that neither instrument achieves alone.

The evidentiary discipline is fully transferable and is arguably the most important element for states beginning this work now. Iran's ability to construct a documentary record that could withstand scrutiny from independent international organisations - the Red Crescent documentation, the Human Rights Watch verification, the open letter from American legal experts - was not accidental. It was the product of institutional capacity and strategic intention. States that wish to pursue accountability through international legal channels need to be building their evidentiary records now, in peacetime, through bodies whose independence will not be questioned when the political stakes are highest.

The vocabulary strategy is transferable immediately and costs nothing. Iran's insistence on calling what it was owed by its legally accurate name - reparations, not investment funds, not reconstruction assistance, not frozen asset releases - was not merely rhetorical. It was a legal argument being made continuously and publicly, in every negotiating forum and every official statement, that preserved the legal characterisation of the obligation even when the final document avoided the word. States with claims against the United States should be using the legally accurate vocabulary for those claims in every public communication, because the vocabulary shapes the legal record that tribunals eventually examine.

What the Iran case demonstrates, ultimately, is that the international legal architecture built after the Second World War - the ICJ, the ICC, the UN Charter's prohibition on aggression, the laws of armed conflict, the doctrine of state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts - is not merely aspirational. It is operational. It does not move quickly. It does not move without sustained effort from the states and individuals willing to use it. It does not produce perfect outcomes or complete justice. What it does, when used with sufficient discipline and patience, is produce outcomes - financial, legal, and political - that the world's most powerful military cannot prevent by force.

That is the lesson other countries are studying. The trapdoor, once opened, does not close again simply because the party that fell through it would prefer to pretend it was never there.

The question this case study leaves open is not whether this will happen again. It is when, and which state moves first. Somewhere in a ministry of justice or foreign affairs department, lawyers are already studying the Iran playbook and asking a simple question: what do we have that Iran had ?

Conclusion: What the Case Study Demonstrates

Iran did not win the military conflict that began on February 28, 2026. The Islamic Republic absorbed an assault of extraordinary scale and precision, suffered thousands of civilian deaths, lost its Supreme Leader and significant portions of its military and political leadership in the opening hours, endured months of economic disruption from a naval blockade, and emerged from the conflict with its infrastructure damaged and its population exhausted. To describe this as a victory in the conventional sense would be inaccurate.

What Iran demonstrated, over the four months between the first strike and the Versailles signing, was something considerably rarer and arguably more consequential: that a state facing overwhelming military force can extract financial accountability from that force by pursuing a parallel legal and financial strategy with sufficient discipline, sophistication, and patience to outlast the political will of the attacking party. The mechanism by which this was achieved involved five interlocking elements.

The first was pre-existing legal infrastructure. The ICJ proceeding that produced the February 2026 compensation schedule had been running since 2016 and had already produced a ruling in Iran's favour. Iran went to war with a court date, a legal team, and a decade of evidentiary preparation behind it - assets that survived the first bombs and continued accumulating value throughout the conflict.

The second was real-time evidentiary discipline. Iran documented what was being done to it from the first hours, using its own institutions, inviting independent international verification, and ensuring that every significant incident - the Minab school, the Gandhi Hospital, the destruction of culturally protected sites in Isfahan - was documented through channels that could not be dismissed as partisan. The open letter from one hundred American legal experts was not something Iran manufactured. It was a consequence of American officials making statements - under oath, in public, on record - that American legal professionals recognised as criminal.

The third was strategic use of the geography it actually controlled. The Strait of Hormuz is not, as decades of American doctrine asserted, international commons. It is sovereign territory - Iranian on one side, Omani on the other - and Iran's decision to administer it as such, with a structured transit regime, per-vessel fees, and bilateral navigation agreements, transformed a military chokehold into a legal and financial instrument.

The fourth was simultaneous collection through multiple channels. Rather than waiting for a single formal legal process to produce a result, Iran pursued compensation through every available mechanism - the ICJ proceeding, the developing ICC case, direct bilateral arrangements with coalition members who had the most to lose from continued strikes, and the formal compensation claim against the five Gulf states. Each channel created pressure on the others and reduced the ability of any single party to simply wait Iran out.

The fifth was the vocabulary strategy: the consistent insistence, across every public statement, counter-proposal, and formal legal filing, that what Iran was owed was reparations - a specific legal category with specific legal consequences - regardless of what Washington preferred to call it. The word does not appear in the Versailles MOU. The legal obligation it describes has not been extinguished by its absence.

The case study has implications that extend well beyond Iran and well beyond the specific conflict it describes. The United States' ability to use economic coercion - currency sanctions, dollar exclusion, asset freezing - as a substitute for negotiation has depended, for decades, on two conditions: the absence of viable alternative settlement infrastructure, and the absence of a successful precedent for extracting financial accountability from the United States through legal means. The Iran case study challenges both conditions simultaneously. The yuan-denominated transit regime demonstrated, with thousands of actual transactions, that alternative settlement infrastructure exists and functions. The Versailles financial transfers, whatever they are called, demonstrated that the United States can be made to pay - not on the terms it prefers, not as quickly as strict legal analysis would require, but in a direction that the law demands and that political and financial pressure can accelerate.

The ICJ case remains open. The court's November deadline has not moved. The reparations question has not been resolved, only deferred and partially addressed. Other countries - Nicaragua with its 1986 judgement against the United States, Afghanistan with its frozen central bank reserves, Venezuela with its seized assets, Cuba with its decades of documented sanctions damage - have watched how Iran pursued this campaign and are studying what it produced.

In 1507, the Portuguese arrived at the Strait of Hormuz, recognised immediately that whoever controlled that water controlled the most important trade route in the world, built a fortress on Hormuz Island, and collected tolls. They called it civilisation. Five centuries later, the United States arrived at the same geographical conclusion by a different intellectual route and called it freedom of navigation. The logic was identical; the branding had improved. What changed in 2026 was not the geography - Iran's territory has bordered those waters since before the concept of a nation-state existed - but the capacity and the will to insist, through legal and financial means, that the geography had always mattered. The strait was never empty. The sovereignty was always there. The record of what was done against it has been assembled, filed, and placed before courts that operate on their own schedules, under their own rules, and have demonstrated that they do not require American agreement to function.

The map was always there. The law was always there. Iran used both, and the bill, under whatever name Washington prefers to give it, is being paid.

This case study draws on the public record of the US-Israel war against Iran, including testimony before the United States Senate Banking Committee (February 5, 2026), the ICJ procedural order in Certain Iranian Assets (February 25, 2026), UN Fact-Finding Mission documentation, Human Rights Watch reporting, Iranian Red Crescent documentation submitted to the ICC, independent legal analysis published by international law scholars, and publicly reported diplomatic developments through June 2026. All direct quotations are drawn from the public record.

Further Reading:

This case study draws on approximately 50 published pieces from the aussiefemmebot archive. The following ten pieces are recommended for readers who wish to go deeper on specific threads of the argument.

No Shots Fired - The Bessent congressional testimony in full context. The foundational admission that economic warfare against Iranian civilians was deliberate policy, stated under oath, before the wider military conflict began.

Iran Should Go to the ICC - Here's Why They'd Win - A detailed examination of the Article 12(3) jurisdictional mechanism and the evidentiary case Iran could bring before the International Criminal Court.

Terra Nullius at Sea - The geographical and legal argument that the Strait of Hormuz was never international Commons. The terra nullius parallel developed in full.

The Trapdoor - The precedent argument explicitly: Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba and what an Iranian legal victory means for every country with an outstanding grievance against the United States under international law.

The Invoice - Iran’s formal compensation demand against the five Gulf states, the ARSIWA framework, and why the $ 270 billion dollar figure is a legal filing rather than a negotiating position.

Hopscotch for Oil - The petrodollar as a structural explanation for the US conduct in the Middle East. The material logic underneath the stated rationale.

The Board - A strategic map of who controlled what at the decisive moment of the conflict: Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan, and the United States, assessed against what each party actually held rather than what they claimed.

The Toll Is The Reparation - The rial demand and its three-dimensional strategic logic: financial, legal, and political simultaneously.

The Abraham Accords Were Always About Iran - The UAE bilateral payment to Tehran and what it demonstrates about the limits of the Abraham Accords.

The Vocabulary of $300 Billion - The Versailles MOU examined closely: what the document says, what it avoids saying, and why the legal distinction between reparations and reconstruction assistance matters for every legal proceeding that follows.

This case study is independent work, written without institutional backing, funding, or editorial oversight. It draws on approximately fifty published pieces developed across this archive since December 2025.

If this analysis was useful to you, there are two ways to support the work that produced it.

The Correspondent tier - $80 USD annually - gives you access to deeper dives and puts you directly in the room where the thinking happens first. Correspondents are the reason this archive exists.

If you're not ready for that commitment, a one-off contribution via Buy Me a Coffee goes directly toward the media lab I'm building in Melbourne, where the next stage of this work will take shape. No sign-up. No obligation. Whatever you can spare.

Either way: subscribe, share this with someone who needs to read it, and find me on Spoutible where I track developments in real time.

More work of this kind is coming.

The record doesn't stop. Neither do I.

International Law, Iran, Geopolitics, International Court of Justice (ICJ), Middle East, Strait of Hormuz, US politics, world politics.

There is a comment turning up under nearly every video and post about the US-Iran memorandum of understanding, in one phrasing or another: why is America giving Iran $300 billion ?

It is not, on its face, an unreasonable question.

It is also the wrong question, asked in a way that makes the right answer impossible to give.

The document Donald Trump signed this week, at the Palace of Versailles, in the same building that hosted the 1919 treaty meant to end the war that started the century's worst sequel, hasn't been read for what it actually is.

It has been read for what people expect an "Iran deal" to be, and measured against a template it was never built from.

The template everyone is using

When Americans hear "Iran nuclear deal," the shape in their head is the JCPOA.

That shape is specific and it is reasonable to default to it, because the 2015 agreement was, structurally, almost entirely about one thing.

• Enrichment capped at 3.67 percent.

• A stockpile cut by roughly 98 percent, down to 300 kilograms.

• Centrifuge numbers reduced from around 20,000 to just over 5,000.

• An IAEA inspection regime, described at the time as the most intrusive ever negotiated.

• Sunset clauses on staggered timelines.

The nuclear question wasn't a section of the JCPOA.

It WAS the document.

Everything else - including the sanctions relief - was tethered to verified compliance with the stated technical settlement.

So when people look at the 14-point MOU now on the table and ask whether it addresses the nuclear question, they're asking the JCPOA's question of a document that isn't a JCPOA.

What this document actually is

Look at where the weight sits in the 14 points, now signed rather than merely drafted.

• A permanent end to hostilities, on every front, including Lebanon.

• Withdrawal of forces.

• Lifting of a naval blockade, with the Strait of Hormuz now reopened and tankers already moving through it.

• Suspension of oil and petrochemical sanctions.

• A requirement for the US and its allies to present reconstruction PLANS worth at least $300 billion.

• Release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian funds, half before negotiations even begin.

That is the substance of the document.

The nuclear question - reported as the single most contested issue in the closed-door talks - appears in the signed text as a reaffirmation of an NPT commitment Iran already held, and as the item deferred into a 60-day negotiating window, alongside sanctions relief and the broader economic rebuilding program.

That is not a nonproliferation treaty with everything else attached …..

That is a war-termination and compensation instrument, with the nuclear question pushed into a follow-on negotiation rather than resolved in the text.

The centre of gravity is cessation of hostilities and money.

Centrifuges are a footnote to be sorted out later.

Put plainly: this reads far closer to a settlement than to a treaty.

The document this actually resembles

There is a real settlement sitting directly underneath this MOU that makes the comparison more than a turn of phrase.

The International Court of Justice issued its compensation schedule in the Certain Iranian Assets case on 25 February 2026 - three days before the war began.

This document appears MUCH CLOSER to the standard shape of a state response to a finding of wrongful conduct:

• a legal determination, followed by a negotiated instrument that converts the finding into a transfer.

• A fixed sum, or a sum to be quantified.

• An asset-release mechanism.

• A reconstruction allocation.

And - this is the part doing the most work - language that calls the transfer almost anything except what it is.

Reparations require a state to have done something it has to answer for.

They are not a negotiated kindness; under the law of state responsibility, full reparation for an internationally wrongful act is an obligation, not a gift.

That is precisely why the word “reparations” doesn't appear here.

It isn't that the obligation is absent.

It's that admitting the obligation by name forces an admission of wrongfulness that no government wants attached to its own signature.

So the transfer survives. The label doesn't.

Why the comment sections are asking the wrong question

People are not confused because they lack information.

They are confused because the document was worded so that the answer to "why are we giving them $300 billion" doesn't arrive in those terms.

Reconstruction. Investment fund. Frozen assets. Sanctions relief.

Every available word is a word for something other than compensation owed for an unlawful act - and each one is technically true while being substantively evasive.

If the positions were reversed, if Iran had struck US infrastructure and a comparable instrument required Tehran to fund American reconstruction, no outlet anywhere would spend three weeks debating what to call it.

It would be reparations within a day, and every American news cycle would say so.

The asymmetry isn't in the law.

ARSIWA doesn't care which state is asking the question.

(ARSIWA - the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts - international law, including the obligation to make full reparation)

The asymmetry is in the wording- and that asymmetry is the actual story sitting underneath the document, not a side note to it.

The mistake in the framing

There's a real risk in this approach, and it isn't a legal one.

It's a political one, and it may turn out to be Washington's own.

A government that spends a war's aftermath calling reparations an "investment fund" is making a bet that nobody will say the word out loud before the money has already moved.

That bet gets harder to win the longer the underlying fact pattern stays visible: a war the US started, a UN-unauthorised use of force, an ICJ compensation schedule that predates the first strike by three days, and now a financial settlement structured around comparable logic.

At some point, the gap between what the document does and what it's permitted to be called stops being a drafting choice and starts being the headline.

Americans have spent eighty years as the country that doesn't pay.

The framework for what happens when that changes already exists in international law, has existed the whole time, and has simply never been pointed at Washington before.

This document, now signed in both English and Farsi, in a palace built for treaties that did not always hold, is the first time it has been pointed there.

Whether it holds is a separate question - Iran's own chief negotiator has already called the deal a US "failure," even as Tehran's state media presents it as a win.

When the two governments that signed a document cannot agree on who came out ahead, that is usually a sign the document settled less than either side is currently claiming.

There is one more silence worth noting, because it sits in exactly the same place as all the others.

Vance has said the $300 billion will be "funded by the Gulf Coast coalition" - not American money, he insists, not even once.

Asked directly to confirm it, Qatar's Foreign Ministry said only that it could not comment on the figure.

Not a yes. Not a no.

A government that's pleased to be funding Iran's reconstruction usually says so.

Further reading: 'The Vocabulary of $ 300 Billion' on the word substitution across drafts - tracking the dollar’s journey through different labels (reparations, investment fund, and a requirement to present reconstruction plans), and what each labelling does legally.

Part One to this piece.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

"Basically a surrender document."

That was Congressman Seth Moulton's description of the memorandum of understanding Iran and the United States signed this week.

Donald Trump put his name to it at the Palace of Versailles, during a dinner with Emmanuel Macron, a hundred years and one war after the same palace hosted the treaty that was supposed to end the last one.

Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian signed remotely.

A hundred billion dollars in war costs.

Fourteen American deaths.

And, in Moulton's framing, a deal that reopens a strait that was open before the war started.

--

Gregory Meeks, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called the war "misguided and detrimental to American interests."

On the other side of the aisle, Senator Ted Cruz called the arrangement "giving billions of dollars to lunatics."

Neither man was making an argument about international law.

Look at the shape of what they're describing - a state that started a war, achieved none of its strategic objectives, and is now paying to end it.

That is roughly what a reparations obligation looks like from the outside - regardless of what anyone ends up calling the payment.

Here is the thing worth sitting with now that the signatures are actually on the page: the word "reparations" does not appear to be in the document at all.

Three hundred billion dollars, and a different name for it

In various drafts reported over the past three weeks, the figure of $300 billion has circulated as an "investment fund" - a vehicle for "Tehran's postwar reconstruction and economic growth," in the language of one report.

Iranian negotiators have reportedly gone further still, suggesting the fund could give large American oil companies access to joint ventures in Iran, fourth-largest reserves on earth.

The most recent version of the 14-point framework goes a step further again.

It does not describe $300 billion as a fund Iran receives.

It describes a requirement for the US and its allies to present reconstruction PLANS for Iran worth at least $300 billion.

Not a payment.

Not a fund.

An obligation to produce a proposal.

Each version moves the figure further from "money owed" and closer to "process to be designed."

Reparations, to investment fund, to a requirement to present a plan for a fund - three steps, and at each one the $300 billion VOCABULARY gets a little less like compensation and a little more like an item on an agenda.

Whether that figure survived into the text actually signed remains unclear from the reporting so far - much of the coverage of the signed MOU foregrounds a different, smaller figure: roughly $24 billion in Iran's own frozen assets, to be released during the 60-day negotiating window that follows.

Even what the deal achieved is being told as three different stories at once.

Tehran's state media is presenting it as a victory.

Washington is presenting it as Iran capitulating to "maximum pressure."

Iran's own chief negotiator, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has already called it a US "failure" - which means even the two governments that signed it can't agree between themselves on who won, let alone on what $300 billion is for.

Set the exact number aside for a moment, because the more interesting question is the one underneath it: why would it matter whether $300 billion arrives as "reparations" or as an "investment fund," if the dollar figure is the same either way ?

Here's why.

Reparations are not a courtesy.

Under the International Law Commission's Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, a state responsible for an internationally wrongful act is under a legal obligation to make full reparation for the injury caused - and that obligation flows from the wrongfulness of the act, not from a negotiation.

An "investment fund," by contrast, is just two governments agreeing to a commercial arrangement.

Same money. Completely different legal animal.

One that says something about what the war was, and one that says nothing at all.

That's the gap.

And it's a gap that doesn't close just because a document goes quiet on the word.

Whose leadership is signing this ?

One more thing worth holding in view: Iran goes into this negotiation under leadership that didn't exist when the war started.

Mojtaba Khamenei became Supreme Leader after his father was killed in the opening strike on 28 February - along with, by several accounts, other members of his immediate family.

He's been described by regional analysts as aligned with the conservative current, likely to maintain the same emphasis on sovereignty and independence his father held.

It seems unlikely that a leadership formed under those circumstances would treat the reparations question as closed just because a document doesn't use the word.

The $24 billion in frozen assets is Iran's own money - unfreezing it doesn't require anyone to admit the war was wrongful, so it's a much easier thing for Washington to sign.

If the $300 billion figure has genuinely dropped out of the current draft, that may say less about whether Iran has given up the claim, and more about which parts of this negotiation were easy and which were deferred into the 60 days that follow.

Those 60 days aren't the only clock running.

The International Court of Justice issued its compensation schedule in the Certain Iranian Assets case on 25 February - three days before the war began.

That judgment doesn't depend on anything signed in Versailles.

It's a separate track, and nothing reported so far suggests Iran has agreed to give it up.

Epilogue

Maybe none of this matters in practice - maybe the money moves either way and the label is just diplomatic packaging that lets Washington avoid an awkward headline.

That's possible, and probably part of what's going on.

It's also possible that the label is the point.

A reparations payment carries an admission with it - and an admission can be used elsewhere.

Iran has a live compensation schedule from the ICJ in Certain Iranian Assets.

It has separate claims against Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Jordan and Bahrain over their territory being used in the February strikes.

An "investment fund" carries no such admission, and so leaves nothing for those other proceedings to point to.

So the thing to actually look for in the now-signed text isn't the dollar figure.

It's whether the MOU contains any language of waiver, release, or "full and final settlement" - the kind of clause that would extinguish or prejudice Iran's standing in those other forums.

If that language is absent, the $300 billion question - whatever it ends up being called - simply hasn't been resolved. It's been moved.

There's a smaller clue worth watching too.

The same 14-point framework states what the final agreement, after the 60 days, will actually cover: enrichment and enriched materials, sanctions relief, and the program for rebuilding Iran's economy.

It also states what has been "definitively removed from the agenda" - Iran's missile program, and support for regional Resistance groups.

Two lists: what's in, and what's been explicitly taken out.

“Reparations” appears in neither.

Not included in the scope of the final agreement, and not on the list of things removed from discussion altogether.

That could mean it's been quietly absorbed into "the program for rebuilding Iran's economy" - which would make the $300 billion figure, under whatever name, the reparations question's last remaining foothold in the text.

Or it could mean it was never inside this framework's scope at all, and sits entirely outside it, alongside the ICJ judgment, waiting.

Part Two - 'What Kind of Document Is This ?' - This is about the document’s architecture - comparing the 14-point MOU actual structure (war termination, asset release, reconstruction allocation, nuclear question deferred) against the JCPOA’s structure (nuclear settlement as the entire document), and arguing that this MOU reads closer to a settlement instrument than a non-proliferation treaty.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

That was Congressman Seth Moulton's description of the memorandum of understanding Iran and the United States are due to sign in Geneva on 19 June.

And, in Moulton's framing, a deal that reopens a strait that was open before the war started.

Gregory Meeks, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, calle…

Read more

The Abraham Accords were never really about peace.

They were about Iran.

The entire premise of the Accords was shared adversary logic.

You normalise with Israel because Iran is the common threat and Israel is the capable partner.

That logic just collapsed - not because the UAE chose Israel over Iran, but because the UAE chose Abu Dhabi over both.

By that I mean they chose the emirate that holds power.

Reuters reported on Friday that the UAE has already delivered $3 billion to Iran as part of a bilateral arrangement to halt Iranian strikes on Emirati territory.

Total funds under the agreement range between $10 billion and $20 billion depending on the source

Iran didn't just strike the UAE into submission; it invoiced it bilaterally … before the broader US-Iran settlement is even finalised.

The UAE was the most hawkish Arab state in the coalition.

It lobbied Washington to keep fighting.

It participated in strikes on Iranian territory.

It tried to call in Pakistan's debt obligations as punishment for hosting mediation talks - forcing Saudi Arabia to supply Islamabad a fresh loan to cover what Abu Dhabi weaponised.

Israeli Iron Dome batteries and personnel were deployed to UAE soil.

Netanyahu made a secret wartime visit to Abu Dhabi and announced a joint defence acquisition fund.

And then the IRGC visited Abu Dhabi last week to meet Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed - the UAE's national security chief - and the talks "quickened pace."

Iran has reportedly approached at least two other Gulf Arab states with the same arrangement.

The reparations collection rounds have begun.

Iran is still standing, still enriching, still administering a toll regime in the Strait, and has now extracted bilateral payments from the coalition partner that was loudest about destroying it.

The Abraham Accords were designed to isolate Iran permanently. To build a ring of normalised Arab-Israeli relations tight enough that Tehran would have no room to manoeuvre, no sympathetic neighbours, no economic lifelines.

Iran just sent the most hawkish member of that cohort an invoice.

It has been playing the long game since before the first signature was dry.

It is still playing it now.

And it is still winning.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 18 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

Take a long look at this gorgeous piece of land.

Squint a little and you'll see a tiny white house at the centre of the landscape.

This is an island off the coast of the Isle of Skye, in Scotland, called Soay.

It is currently listed for sale with Strutt and Parker in Edinburgh for £ 925,000.

I have been looking at photos of the island for days now, and I cannot stop.

Not because I have £ 925,000. I don't.

But because the Gillies family of Portree on Skye's coast, five kilometres away in the distance, were my direct ancestors in the 1830s. And my MacPhersons of Ardnamurchan looked across at this same coastline from their lives on the mainland for hundreds of years prior. The MacNeils of Barra sailed these waters for thousands of years. The MacDonalds of Sleat stood on the shore directly opposite this island and called it home from the time of its Nordic naming, around 700AD.

All my kin. My Scottish ancestral kin.

I now live in a hemisphere far from my lineage - poor servants that were forced onto ships from their homes in Portree, Isle of Skye, during the Highland Clearances of 1837 - in exchange for a colonial settlement they then also called Skye on the Hunter River, in New South Wales, Australia.

We weren't always poor. My Scottish lineage runs to Lords and Ladies, Barons and Baronesses, a Chancellor, a parliamentarian, the illegitimate firstborn of a King; sometimes all in the same person.

It has been my dream to live on my ancestral land.

And apparently I can - for £ 925,000 - which is about AUD $1.8 million, or USD $1.24 million.

There is just one catch.

I would be sharing it with the rest of the world whether I liked it or not. No matter how they advertise the listing.

The Private Island That Isn't Private

There is - for want of a better description - a quaint law in Scotland that would offend the sensibilities of many, if not most, American, Canadian, British or Australian buyers of Soay Island.

The experience of the asset isn't yours exclusively.

You pay for the responsibility. Everyone else gets the enjoyment for free.

You buy the asset. You pay for the conservation, the maintenance, the rates, and the public have the right to come and experience the landscape, photograph it, walk on it, camp on it. On their schedule, not yours.

You buy into a legally constrained position in a publicly accessible landscape, with partial ownership rights, no infrastructure, and a marketing narrative that doesn't match the legal reality.

That's what's for sale.

The house is a shell, built in the early 1880s, sitting unattended for 30 years in brutal Atlantic winters. In 1883 a witness before the Napier Commission testified that the tide had destroyed a house on that island within living memory. The island hasn't changed. The Atlantic hasn't changed.

The gap between what the listing claims and what the Scottish Land Reform Act of 2003 provides is real and documentable. The Act gives the general public the right to access the land.

You read that right.

You can buy land, but you cannot buy solitude, control, or perceptual isolation in the way the marketing implies.

What protects buyers is disclosure law, not agent goodwill. And that's exactly why the disclosure question matters.

The Disclosure

The island has defeated romantic buyers before. Many arrived with enthusiasm and capital and left with neither. That's documented history, and relevant context.

It's a property for sale at a price that makes community buyout very difficult. That's worth saying, because the sense of history you'd be buying into - which is actually what you'd be purchasing - matters more to the remnants of the clans and to Scotland's historic record than the asking price and the slight of hand of the landed gentry.

It was always so.

It's not a restoration project. Not a private island fantasy.

It's something much older and much more important than that.

It's a Bronze Age landscape that has survived everything humans have thrown at it. The sheep that were there when Norse sailors named the island Sauða-ey - Sheep Island - a thousand years ago are still there, genetically almost unchanged. The peat that covers the Torridonian sandstone bedrock and eight freshwater lochs is still there. The burn running down to the bay flows eternal. The ruins of every human attempt to build something permanent on that island are still there - the shark oil factory, the stone houses, the meeting hall, the foundations of forty five buildings that once housed a living Gaelic community.

The Land Reform Act of 2003 was designed to protect people from what happened to Soay's community during the Highland Clearances. It is the culmination of several earlier changes to Scottish law. The pendulum swung over three generations from protecting no one to protecting everyone - including people who want to camp outside your dining room window.

Maybe that was the right intention in 1883, when a commission was formed to hear the claims of remnant families who were crofters.

It was referred to as the Napier Commission, and it changed Scottish law. It produced the Crofters Holdings Act of 1886.

A croft, as the commissioners understood, was a tenancy. A small piece of land - some arable ground, a house, access to common grazing for cattle and sheep. Not a grand thing. Not wealth. But enough. Enough to feed a family through a Highland winter, enough to keep animals, enough to plant oats in the spring and hope the summer was kind.

The Highland Clearances had produced what many considered the worst humanitarian crisis on British soil in living memory. Families had been driven from land their ancestors had farmed for centuries, loaded onto ships, scattered across the world or left to starve on coastal margins too poor to sustain them. People died. Many people. It took the government, facing the consequences of a century of sanctioned dispossession, to finally send someone to the Isle of Skye to listen.

In May 1883 a man named Alexander McCaskill sat before the Napier Commission and told them everything about Soay Island.

Five commissioners with notebooks sat at long tables in village halls and church rooms in Bracadale, listening to men who had never before been asked by anyone in authority what they thought about anything. The people giving testimony were Scottish Gaelic speakers testifying through interpreters to commissioners appointed by a government in London.

To get to Bracadale, McCaskill would have crossed Soay Sound in his own boat, landed on the Skye shore, and made his way overland through country that in 1883 had no roads worth the name - tracks through bog and over rock, the great black peaks of the Cuillin still carrying snow at their tips even in May, the wind coming off the Atlantic without anything between it and him for three thousand miles.

His family had been born on Soay - the children and grandchildren of people relocated there during the clearances, placed on land that couldn't sustain them because it wasn't even good enough for sheep. Twenty three households. My family met the government's conditions for assisted passage to Australia. His family didn't.

The Commission heard how those twenty three households were removed to Soay Island and promised crofting rights on land that was not viable for subsistence. They were left there for another seventy years.

Ownership in Scotland is not the same as control over presence, perception, or use of space. It is often not a single unified object, but a stack of overlapping rights systems - not just crofting, but access rights, planning law, and environmental constraints.

The modern private island is not a sealed space of solitude, but a managed intersection between ownership, regulation, visibility, and access. What is sold is not isolation, but proximity to the idea of isolation.

The Conversation I'm Not Supposed To Be Having

There is a live political conversation happening in Scotland right now about who owns the land, who should own the land, and what happens when the answer to both questions keeps being the same small group of people.

It has been running, in various forms, since Alexander McCaskill sat before the Napier Commission in 1883. The Crofters Holdings Act, the Land Reform Act, the community right to buy - each piece of legislation was an attempt to shift the balance.

None of them fully did.

In 2025 the Clan Donald Estate - thousands of acres on the Sleat peninsula of Skye, directly across the water from Soay - came up for sale. The Sleat Community Trust formed a working group to explore a community buyout. They waited five weeks for the documents they needed to assess the purchase. The documents arrived too late for proper due diligence. The bid collapsed three days before the deadline.

The estate sold. The same agents handling the Soay listing handled that sale too.

I watched that process from the other side of the world. I have ancestors buried in that soil. I had no seat at that table and no mechanism to contribute even if I had.

That's not a complaint. It's an observation about a structural gap - one that exists wherever displacement has scattered the people most connected to a place to the other side of the world.

The Scottish land reform conversation is happening without the diaspora. Not because the diaspora doesn't care. But because caring, from this distance, has no operational weight.

That's what I want to change.

So I started thinking about an app.

Something that sits between storytelling and funding - where diaspora connection to a place isn't just sentiment or genealogy, but can be organised into collective action.

Not ownership as nostalgia. Not ownership as symbolism. But ownership as coordination.

A structure where people linked to a place through ancestry, history, or record can pool intent, money, and decision-making into something that can actually move in the real world. Not a petition. Not a fan club. A mechanism.

Because if local communities can organise to buy land, then dispersed communities should at least be able to organise their relationship to it in a way that has operational weight.

What doesn't exist yet is the structure in between. And once you notice that gap, you can't unsee it.

The idea is simple: a platform where places like Soay - or any landscape with a layered history of settlement, removal, and return - are not just static assets on a map, but active nodes in a distributed network of people who are already, in some sense, attached to them. Not legally attached. Not physically present. But still connected in the only way that survives displacement: through record, story, name, and inheritance of attention.

The app doesn't try to replace land law. It doesn't bypass crofting systems, or community trusts, or existing legal structures. It sits alongside them - but it changes what becomes possible inside them.

At the most basic level, it does three things.

It lets people find a place they are already tied to, even loosely, through ancestry, migration history, or collective memory. It lets them contribute resources toward a defined outcome for that place - acquisition, restoration, conservation, or transition into community control. And it gives that collective contribution a structured voice: not ownership of land itself, but participation in the decisions surrounding its future.

Contributors nominate where their stake lands. Someone with MacLeod ancestry nominates Lewis. Someone with Campbell connections nominates Argyll. Someone whose family came off the Midlothian in 1837 nominates Skye. The pool isn't one undifferentiated fund - it's organised by place, which is exactly the point. People aren't contributing to a general cause. They're investing in a specific landscape they're already connected to, and their vote travels with their money.

The reason that matters is timing.

Community buyouts in Scotland keep failing not because the intent isn't there, but because the process is designed in a way that makes intent insufficient. You need documents to do due diligence. You need due diligence to secure funding. You need funding to make a bid. And if the documents arrive three days before the deadline, the sequence collapses - not loudly, not dramatically, just quietly and completely.

The Sleat Community Trust, attempting to buy the Clan Donald Estate on the same coastline as Soay in 2025, withdrew its bid after waiting five weeks for the information it needed to assess the purchase. The timeline that remained was not workable. Whether that was deliberate or administrative is not for me to say. What I can say, from years working in property development, is that a vendor genuinely motivated to sell makes documents available early. That's how transactions close.

The app changes that equation.

A coordinated community with pooled resources and a clear mandate doesn't need to scramble for funding after the documents arrive. It arrives at the table already ready. The information gap stops being a fatal obstacle and becomes simply an inconvenience.

Because once enough people are coordinated, "not possible" stops being a fixed condition and becomes a funding problem.

The legal structure that makes contributor participation real rather than symbolic already exists in Scotland. It's called a community benefit society - a registered cooperative where contributors buy shares at a fixed price, the pooled capital funds the purchase, and shareholders vote on major decisions about the land. One member, one vote, regardless of share size. No single contributor dominates.

This isn't a novel concept. Community shares have funded Scottish pub buyouts, wind farms, and land purchases. The Financial Conduct Authority registers them. Audited accounts are required. The governance is transparent and legally enforceable.

What contributors would hold is not a financial investment expecting a return. It's a legal interest in a real asset, with a genuine vote on its future - what gets restored, how the land is managed, whether heritage tourism or conservation or both.

That's the difference between a donation and a stake.

The app works in both directions.

The diaspora provides the capital; the local community provides the activation - the legal standing, the committee work, the relationships with Highland Council and the Crofting Commission that no one on the other side of the world can replicate from a distance.

Right now, forming a community trust means volunteering for months of thankless administrative work toward an uncertain outcome. The funding may not materialise. The documents may arrive too late. The bid may collapse anyway.

The app changes that calculation. If the capital is already pooled and waiting, the committee secretary in Sleat isn't working toward a maybe. They're working toward a funded mandate. That's a different ask entirely.

The diaspora funds it. The local community activates it. Neither can do it alone. That's the point.

One practical note: as an Australian resident I can't establish a Scottish community trust myself, and I wouldn't need to. The mechanism isn't about personal ownership. It's about arriving at the table with coordinated resources ready to hand to people who have the legal standing to act - bodies like the Sleat Community Trust, who already exist, already have the relationships, and already understand the ground.

The only thing missing is the money being ready when the window opens.

In practice, that means something very simple and slightly unsettling: places stop being privately imagined as belonging to one buyer at a time, and start being publicly engaged with as shared projects - even before ownership changes hands.

Not everyone will like that. That's the point.

Because the assumption underneath most land markets is that interest is passive until purchase. This assumes something else entirely: that interest can be active, distributed, and organised long before a transaction ever happens.

And once that assumption exists, the line between viewer, descendant, buyer, and community stops being stable. It starts to blur. Not loudly. Just enough that it can't quite be ignored.

There are crowdfunding platforms that have been used for Scottish community buyouts before. The Langholm Moor purchase used GoFundMe. Community share offers have been run through Crowdfunder Scotland. The Scottish Land Fund provides government grants of up to £1 million. The Scottish Connections Fund provides small grants to diaspora organisations with Scottish links.

But none of them do what I'm describing here. None of them combine ancestry-based geographic nomination with a standing diaspora fund that is ready before the land comes up for sale, not scrambling after the fact. None of them give a diaspora contributor a legal stake and a vote tied to a specific landscape they're already connected to through name, record, and inheritance of attention.

The closest model is the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust buyout in 1997, which drew contributions from Scots worldwide - but that was a single campaign for one specific island, not a standing platform that activates whenever land comes up anywhere across the Highlands and Islands.

That gap exists. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

If that idea interests you - if you have Scottish ancestry and you've ever felt the distance between where you are and where your people came from as something more than sentiment - I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

You don't need to commit to anything. There's no form, no fee, no obligation. This is an expression of interest, nothing more.

Tell me your ancestral surname and the part of Scotland your family came from. If enough people respond, it tells me the appetite is there to build this properly - with the right legal structure, the right governance, and the right partnerships on the ground in Scotland.

That's where it starts.

HERE’S THE PLAN

I didn’t set out to turn this into anything structured.

It started with a listing for a remote island off Skye, and a fairly simple curiosity about what “private island” actually means when you look at it through law, access, infrastructure, and geography instead of marketing language.

But the more I looked at it, the more it stopped being about one island.

It became a much simpler question.

Not whether places like this can be bought - they obviously can - but whether there is any meaningful connection between people who care about these places, and whether that connection ever shows up in real, practical ways when it actually matters.

Because at the moment, it mostly doesn’t.

Or at least, there is no obvious mechanism for it to. So I want to run a very small, informal test of that idea. Not a project. Not a fund. Not a proposal. Just a sense check.

If you’re still reading, you already know the context, so I’ll keep this simple.

I’m curious about three things, and I’m not looking for anything more formal than a comment or a sentence in reply.

First - if any of this resonates at all, where does it point you ?

Is there a place in Scotland - even loosely, even vaguely - that feels connected to you in some way ?

It doesn’t have to be precise or genealogical or well-defined. I’m just trying to understand whether this is actually place-specific for people, or whether it’s just general interest in the idea of “remote Scotland” as a concept.

Second - what do people actually do with an idea like this ?

If something like this existed in the real world in a more developed form, would you:

• follow it casually and see where it goes

• occasionally check in if something interesting happened

• or just leave it alone entirely

I’m not trying to measure enthusiasm. I’m trying to understand whether it sits in the background of people’s attention at all.

And finally - and this is the loosest of the three - what role would you naturally see yourself having in something like this, if any ?

Most people would probably do nothing, and that’s completely fine. Some might just watch. Some might talk about it. A smaller number might actually help shape or organise something if it ever became real.

I’m not asking for commitments. There is nothing being collected, pooled, or built here.

I’m just trying to understand whether there is any real-world signal behind the idea, or whether it only exists in my head because I’ve been looking at one unusually strange property listing for too long.

Even a single sentence in response is enough.

Not because I’m building a dataset, but because I’m trying to see what this looks like from outside my own thinking.

That’s it.

aussiefemmebot writes from Melbourne, Australia, in a New York-style batchelorette apartment in Upper East Brunswick, where she lives with her sighthounds, Fletcher & Millie. She covers constitutional and international law - and the human consequences behind global politics.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

On 1 January 2027, someone opens the door to the most contested office on earth and finds every unresolved crisis of the last decade waiting on the desk.

The selection process for the United Nations Secretary General is underway.

Part One covers the 80 year record of the role.

LINK TO PART ONE

Part Two introduces the first four candidates.

LINK TO PART TWO

The field has grown.

On 11 May, Antigua and Barbuda nominated María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés of Ecuador as the fifth candidate: former foreign minister, former defence minister, and President of the UN General Assembly 2018-2019 - the fourth woman and first from Latin America to hold that position.

She is the only candidate who has already run the General Assembly from the inside.

She entered after the public dialogue phase closed, and the Security Council will still consider her - but she has not had the same platform as the other four.

Three women are now in this race alongside two men. For the first time in 80 years that is a serious possibility rather than a gesture.

What's On The Desk

Whoever takes that chair on 1 January 2027 inherits every open file the institution has been unable to close.

Gaza: still unresolved, with humanitarian access contested, where the central legal question is the occupation itself and the obligation on all states under international law to bring it to an end.

Ukraine: an active war, now in its fourth year.

Iran: a conflict that has restructured the Gulf and whose ceasefire has not held.

Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Bosnia.

Sudan alone is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world right now.

It is largely invisible in Western coverage.

Then behind the conflicts, the numbers:

Two thirds of the Sustainable Development Goals are lagging, and the world is running more than four trillion dollars short of what developing countries need to meet basic targets by 2030.

And this month, China holds the Security Council presidency and has convened a ministerial debate on upholding the UN Charter - chaired by Wang Yi.

Russia did the same thing in October 2025.

Both states are using the institution's own platform to argue for Charter integrity while vetoing every resolution that would require them to comply with it.

Guterres said it himself in January: the context is chaos.

That is the inheritance.

How It Actually Gets Decided

The Security Council conducts closed straw polls, using coloured ballots so P5 votes can be identified separately.

Any P5 member who marks a candidate as "discourage" has effectively vetoed them, and the rounds continue until one candidate survives without a single discouragement from any permanent member.

That candidate is then formally recommended to the General Assembly, which has never rejected a Security Council recommendation.

What conditions the P5 extract from candidates before the straw polls begin will never be made public.

Some of it becomes visible only later - in which departments get allocated to which allies, in which issues quietly disappear from the agenda.

The Security Council begins this process in June or July, with a recommendation expected by September and the new Secretary-General taking office 1 January 2027.

What The Process Produces

A candidate no permanent member finds intolerable - that is what the architecture is designed to deliver, and it has done so for 80 years.

The filter is not perfect.

Candidates who appear manageable sometimes are not:

Hammarskjöld got through it, and so did Boutros-Ghali - who was vetoed out after one term when it became clear he meant what he said about using the role.

Five candidates, one chair, the Charter is on the wall. The tools are in the drawer.

The Security Council begins its work in June.

aussiefemmebot writes from Melbourne, Australia, in a New York-style batchelorette apartment in Upper East Brunswick, where she lives with her sighthounds, Fletcher & Millie. She covers constitutional and international law — and the human consequences behind global politics.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

While five Gulf states protest to the IMO, Oman is in Muscat co-drafting the legal framework that will govern the Strait of Hormuz - with Iran.

The United Arab Emirates is having a difficult month.

In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secretly visited the UAE and met with President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed.

Netanyahu's office announced it publicly in May, describing it as a historic breakthrough.

The UAE denied the meeting had taken place.

Netanyahu's own spokesman confirmed it in writing.

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called UAE collusion with Israel unforgivable. He named the UAE as directly involved in the aggression against Iran.

Earlier reporting confirmed that Emirati forces covertly struck Iran's Lavan Island refinery during the war, causing a large fire and disabling much of its capacity for months.

The UAE has not publicly acknowledged the operation.

In the same period, the UAE withdrew from OPEC - a significant break from the Gulf's collective oil production architecture that it had been part of since 1967.

Last Sunday, a drone struck the perimeter of the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant - the UAE's only nuclear facility.

A fire broke out at an electrical generator outside the plant's inner perimeter. No injuries were reported and radiation levels remained normal.

The UAE urged Iraq to prevent hostile acts originating from its territory.

This is the context in which Iran has published its new map.

Iran has redrawn the map.

On 22 May, Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority published a new jurisdiction map defining its claimed management zone over the Strait of Hormuz.

It is not the first.

Eighteen days earlier, the PGSA published an initial map.

This one goes further.

The zone now runs from Kuh-e Mubarak on the Iranian coast to the south of Fujairah in the UAE at the eastern entrance, and from the tip of Qeshm Island to Umm al-Quwain in the UAE at the western entrance.

It claims waters that the UAE and Oman regard as their own sovereign territory.

All vessels transiting the defined area are now required to obtain prior authorisation from the Persian Gulf Strait Authority.

Look at where the eastern boundary lands.

Fujairah is not an accident.

The port sits at the seaward end of the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline - a 1.8 million barrel per day facility built specifically to allow UAE oil exports to bypass the Strait of Hormuz entirely.

It was the UAE's escape route.

Iran has drawn its line directly across it.

Five GCC states responded immediately. Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE sent a joint letter to the International Maritime Organisation warning commercial and merchant vessels not to engage with the PGSA or transit the waterway using Iran's designated routes.

Oman did not sign.

Oman, whose territorial waters are also named in the zone and whose jurisdiction over the Strait's inbound shipping lane is established by a 1974 bilateral treaty with Iran, is negotiating tolls with Tehran instead.

That is the GCC fracture made visible on a map.

Five states protesting to the IMO. One state negotiating bilaterally with Iran.

Iran is not waiting.

The first map established the principle.

The second extended the claim.

Each one published. Each one formal.

Each one a little further than the last.

Iran is not firing. It is filing.

Each map is a legal claim. Each claim that goes unenforced becomes the baseline for the next one. Shipping companies are already negotiating with the PGSA. Tolls are already being paid. Bilateral deals are already being struck.

What makes Oman's position the most significant detail on the board right now is this:

The inbound shipping lane - the one every commercial tanker uses to reach Saudi, Kuwaiti, Iraqi and Emirati loading terminals - runs entirely through Omani territorial waters.

That is not a navigational courtesy.

It is a jurisdictional fact established by the Iran-Oman bilateral treaty of 25 July 1974.

Iran's new map overrides that boundary without reference to the treaty.

And yet on 13 May, a delegation led by Iran's director general for International Legal Affairs sat down with Omani counterparts in Muscat.

They are not negotiating a ceasefire annex or a confidence-building measure.

They are drafting a legal instrument requiring vessels to obtain advance permits from both Iran and Oman before transiting the Strait.

Legal experts, not diplomats, are writing the rules.

No other country is at the table.

Oman is simultaneously the state whose treaty boundaries Iran's map overrides - and Iran's co-author of the system doing the overriding.

By the time the international community decides how to respond, Iran will have been administering the Strait for months with Oman's signature on the governance framework.

The map is not the destination.

It is the method.

aussiefemmebot writes from Melbourne, Australia, in a New York-style batchelorette apartment in Upper East Brunswick, where she lives with her sighthounds, Fletcher & Millie. She covers constitutional and international law — and the human consequences behind global politics.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

Four candidates want the most important job nobody does.

Here is what their records say about them.

This is Part Two of a two-part series.

Part One covers the 80 year record of the role - nine Secretary-Generals, the tools they had, and what happened when they used them.

Read it here before you continue.

Four people want this job.

One withdrew before the field settled.

All of them watched the same 80 year record laid out in Part One.

All of them know what happened to Hammarskjöld.

All of them know what happened to Boutros-Ghali.

They are putting their hands up anyway.

The question is not who wants it - the question is who understands what it actually requires, and who has demonstrated, in their prior record, that they will use the tools when the room is hostile.

Michelle Bachelet (Chile, 74)

Twice president of Chile - the first woman to hold that office - and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Her father was tortured and killed under Pinochet.

She and her mother were imprisoned.

She knows what institutional failure costs at the personal level in a way most candidates do not.

As High Commissioner she produced the Xinjiang report under sustained pressure from China to soften it and from Western governments to release it faster and with stronger findings.

She released it anyway.

That is evidence of institutional nerve - the ability to absorb pressure from multiple directions simultaneously and complete the legal process.

Her candidacy was withdrawn by Chile's current right-wing president on explicitly political grounds.

Brazil and Mexico kept her nomination alive.

She is running without her home country's support.

That political vulnerability will be factored into Security Council negotiations. It shouldn't disqualify her. But it is real.

Rafael Grossi (Argentina, 65)

Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency since 2019.

A career diplomat who has spent the last several years doing something that looks a great deal like what the Secretary-General should do but rarely does - acting on legal mandate when the powerful want you to stand down.

He kept IAEA inspectors at Zaporizhzhia under active bombardment.

He conducted Iran nuclear negotiations through an active war.

He maintained institutional independence when every P5 member was trying to instrumentalise his agency for their own strategic purposes.

That is not political nerve in the SG sense - it is technical and procedural nerve.

Whether it transfers to the broader political role is the open question.

He is also the candidate Washington can probably live with. That is worth noting.

Rebeca Grynspan (Costa Rica, 70)

Former Vice President of Costa Rica and Secretary-General of UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade and Development. It's the UN body that focuses on trade, investment and development issues, particularly for developing countries. It advocates for fairer global economic architecture - debt relief, commodity pricing, the structural disadvantages built into the trading system for poorer nations).

Her work has consistently pushed structural critique of the global economic order - debt architecture, commodity dependence, the asymmetry between wealthy and developing states.

That is a form of institutional courage; it is also a form that operates in economic rather than security architecture.

Her record on the security mechanisms - Article 99, Uniting for Peace, the political conditions that make or break the role in a crisis - is less established.

She is a serious candidate. She is not the candidate the current moment seems to demand.

Macky Sall (Senegal, 64)

Former President of Senegal and the only candidate not from Latin America.

His African Union chairmanship during the Ukraine crisis is the most relevant signal in his record - he refused to simply align with Western framing on a conflict where African states bore consequences they had no part in creating.

That is regional independence demonstrated at the highest level.

But his domestic record carries weight too: third-term manoeuvring, press freedom concerns. The independence instinct, when examined, looks situational rather than principled.

He is also running without his own country's endorsement - Senegal told the African Union it had not backed him, and he was nominated by Burundi.

The regional rotation convention favours Africa this cycle, giving him structural advantages in the selection process that his personal record may not fully support.

Virginia Gamba (Argentina) - withdrawn

She was nominated by the Maldives and her candidacy was withdrawn without explanation in late March.

Her background - UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict - is precisely the profile that builds toward the kind of Secretary-General the current moment needs: someone who has spent their career documenting what happens to civilians when institutions fail.

The Maldives gave no reason for the withdrawal. None has emerged publicly.

She is worth watching for the next cycle.

The window for 2026 is closed.

The Question I'm Putting to You

The Security Council recommendation needs to happen before December.

The P5 veto structure means the candidate most likely to use the tools aggressively is also the candidate most likely to be blocked before they get the chance.

That paradox is not new - it is the central structural problem of the institution.

But look at what you can see right now: Riyad Mansour's visa threatened for wanting a platform, Hondurasgate buried in US media, Venezuela taken, the Strait of Hormuz militarised, the Abraham Accords converted into an operational military alliance.

The cost of another Ban Ki-moon is legible in a way it wasn't before.

That is why it matters who sits in that chair: not symbolically, not diplomatically, but concretely.

The tools are real - Article 99, the rules, the platform to build the political conditions for a Uniting for Peace referral when the Security Council is captured.

They have always been real.

What has been missing is someone willing to use them when the room turns hostile and the cost becomes personal.

The Secretary-General is the one figure in the international architecture who answers to none of that - not to the P5, not to the donor states, not to the network.

To the Charter.

To the 193 member states who built this institution because they understood what happens when there is no referee.

We are watching what happens when there is no referee.

Boutros-Ghali had the nerve. He got one term. Hammarskjöld had the nerve. He got a suspicious plane crash. The next Secretary-General needs to walk in knowing that - and pick them up anyway.

—

So who do you back?

Drop it in the comments.

This is the question the coverage isn't asking.

Your answer matters.

Part Three - where this selection is heading, who the P5 can live with, and what it means for the rest of us - publishes this Sunday.

aussiefemmebot writes from Melbourne, Australia, in a New York-style batchelorette apartment in Upper East Brunswick, where she lives with her sighthounds, Fletcher & Millie. She covers constitutional and international law — and the human consequences behind global politics.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

The US has just threatened to revoke a Palestinian diplomat's visa for telling the truth - meanwhile the world is still choosing its next United Nations Secretary-General like nothing happened.

🌐 🚨 ⁉️

Part One: The Job Nobody Does

The United States is threatening to revoke the visas of the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations unless their ambassador withdraws his candidacy for a vice-presidency of the General Assembly.

Read that sentence again.

This is not a footnote to the current moment.

This is the context in which the world is about to select its next United Nations Secretary-General for a five year term (renewable once - 10 year limit).

Riyad Mansour has spent his career at the UN telling the truth about what is happening to Palestinians.

A State Department cable obtained this week instructed US diplomats in Jerusalem to pressure Palestinian officials to withdraw his candidacy ahead of the 2 June election.

The cable accused Mansour of having a history of accusing Israel of genocide.

Which he did.

Because it is.

Mansour was not running for Secretary-General.

He was seeking one of 21 vice-presidential positions on the General Assembly - a relatively minor procedural role.

The United States threatened to revoke the visas of an entire delegation to stop him from having even that platform.

The United Nations is currently also selecting its next Secretary-General.

Four candidates are under consideration.

The person who wins that appointment will inherit an institution in which the most powerful member state uses visa coercion to remove diplomats from positions they might use to tell the truth.

They will inherit a Security Council paralysed by the vetoes of its permanent members on the two largest active conflicts on earth.

They will inherit 80 years of precedent in which the tools available to the role have been used rarely, timidly, and at enormous personal cost to the people who dared pick them up.

So before we meet the candidates, let's meet the job.

The Tools

The Secretary-General is not a head of state.

They command no army.

They can be ignored and frequently are.

The role comes with legal instruments that have never been fully used - and whose use, when attempted, has consistently been punished.

Article 99 of the UN Charter allows the Secretary-General to bring to the Security Council ANY MATTER they believe threatens international peace and security.

In 80 years it has been formally invoked once - by Kurt Waldheim, a man who spent those same years concealing his Nazi war record.

The Rule allows the Secretary General to mediate, convene, and intervene diplomatically without Security Council authorisation.

It has been used cautiously, when politically safe, and withdrawn when it wasn't.

The platform - the ability to name things publicly from the most visible institutional position on earth - has been used occasionally and then walked back under pressure.

The tools exist.

Here is what happened to the people who used them.

The Record

Trygve Lie (Norway, 1946-1952) showed early nerve, supporting UN intervention in Korea. Then buckled under McCarthyite pressure, allowing the US to purge American UN staff. Resigned under Soviet pressure. The first test of the role's independence. It failed.

Dag Hammarskjöld (Sweden, 1953-1961) is the standard. He invented modern peacekeeping, pushed the boundaries of the rules aggressively, and acted independently in the Congo against the explicit wishes of P5 members. He died in a plane crash in suspicious circumstances in 1961. The investigation into whether his death was an assassination has never been conclusively closed. He remains the only Secretary-General who fully used the role's legal architecture. He is also dead.

U Thant (Burma, 1961-1971) publicly opposed the Vietnam War - remarkable for the era - and played a quiet role during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Worked within lanes. Did not push the legal architecture hard. Left office exhausted and largely ignored.

Kurt Waldheim (Austria, 1972-1981) spent his tenure concealing a Nazi war record that included involvement in war crimes in the Balkans. He managed the institution rather than led it. No nerve. No principle. And yet he holds the distinction of being the only Secretary-General to formally invoke Article 99 - the tool designed for exactly the moments the institution keeps failing to meet. That the one man who used it was also the one concealing crimes against humanity is perhaps the sharpest summary of the role's 80 year record. Elected twice.

Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (Peru, 1982-1991) was a careful diplomat who managed the end of the Cold War transition with competence and almost no friction. He did not use the tools.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt, 1992-1996) is the second instructive case. He pushed hard on Rwanda, Somalia, and Bosnia - tried to use the role as it was designed to be used. He called for stronger action when the Security Council wouldn't move. The United States vetoed his second term. Madeleine Albright cast the sole veto. He was the only Secretary-General ever denied a second term. He was punished specifically for having nerve.

Kofi Annan (Ghana, 1997-2006) called the Iraq War illegal. Established the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Won the Nobel Peace Prize. Rwanda happened on his watch as head of peacekeeping and he carried that weight publicly and honestly for the rest of his life. A man of genuine moral seriousness who operated within significant constraints and knew it.

Ban Ki-moon (South Korea, 2007-2016) is widely regarded as the weakest occupant of the role in its history. He managed, deferred, and avoided. The tools sat untouched for a decade.

António Guterres (Portugal, 2017-2026) knows exactly what the tools are and how to use them. He has made strong public statements on Gaza and climate. He has not invoked Article 99. He has not pushed the Uniting for Peace mechanism. He calculated, consistently, that survival in the role was worth more than using it. His second term ends in December 2026.

The pattern across 80 years is not subtle.

The one Secretary-General who fully used the legal architecture died in suspicious circumstances.

The one who tried to use it in the post-Cold War era was vetoed out by a single P5 member.

Everyone else managed the institution and called it diplomacy.

Now Riyad Mansour has been threatened with visa revocation for wanting a platform from which he might say true things.

These are the jobs.

This is what the battlefield of international law looks like in 2026.

Coming up in Part Two - the four people who want it, what their records suggest, and the question I'm putting to you - is here.

aussiefemmebot writes from Melbourne, Australia, in a New York-style batchelorette apartment in Upper East Brunswick, where she lives with her sighthounds, Fletcher & Millie. She covers constitutional and international law — and the human consequences behind global politics.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

I found this amazing Harvard link through a Substacker.

Harvard’s Thucydides Trap project reviewed five hundred years of history.

In sixteen cases where a rising power threatened to displace a ruling power, twelve ended in war.

The four that didn't all had one thing in common:

The ruling power knew it was losing. It made room. It chose managed decline over catastrophic conflict.

America is not doing that.

America is doing the opposite.

It is escalating precisely as its capacity to escalate is collapsing.

Greenland. Hormuz. Tariffs.

A trip to Beijing that returned nothing except the appearance of activity.

This is what a ruling power looks like when it does not know it is losing.

China controls 90% of global rare earth refining and the sole commercial production of the minerals inside every Tomahawk missile, every JDAM guidance kit, every F-35 and Virginia-class submarine the United States is burning through in the Strait of Hormuz right now.

The countries building alternative supply chains - Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, UK, Brazil, Argentina - will not be ready until 2030 - 2032. And when they are, they will cover a fraction of what is needed.

It will largely have to go to China for processing. That processing infrastructure cannot be replicated quickly regardless of investment.

That is not a future problem.

That is a locked timeline.

China knows it doesn't need a war.

It has enough leverage, enough rare earth dominance, enough Belt and Road architecture across 140 countries, enough patience.

War is expensive and China is already winning without one.

What it wants is dominance through trade and dependency. It has already achieved that. The rest is administration.

The middle powers understand this.

Australia. Canada. France. Germany.

They are not abandoning America sentimentally.

They are reading the numbers. They are making trading arrangements with the power that controls the century because that is what survives a transition.

Trade stops wars.

Integration into the emerging order is not capitulation - it is the thing that keeps the lights on.

America is going to fight the transition.

The odds say so.

Twelve out of sixteen.

It will frame the fight in the language of freedom and democracy and rules-based order, and some of that language will be sincere, and none of it will change the rare earths numbers.

There is a concept Americans understand intimately - the peaceful transition of power.

They built ceremonies around it. They rang bells for it. And then, in the last decade, they lost it domestically.

What they have not yet understood is that the same principle operates globally. The world transfers power too. And fighting that transition does not stop it. It makes the outcome worse.

If the United States cannot project military supremacy outward - no weapons, no leverage, no credible threat - what does it do with that energy?

History answers clearly.

It turns inward.

The supremacy doesn't disappear. It finds domestic targets.

The legal dismantling, the targeting of universities, the removal of protections, the prosecutions - these are not chaos. They are the compulsion finding domestic targets because the external ones are becoming unavailable.

That process is not coming.

It is already underway.

China is not going to announce a victory.

It is going to keep building. Keep trading. Keep processing the minerals that no other country can process at scale - and won't be able to for at least another six years.

The rest of the world has been imagining this for twenty years.

And doing trade instead.

America is debating whether the Beijing visit was a success.

China is not debating anything.

It already won.

Not last week. Not when Trump flew home with rose seeds and a Boeing announcement that analysts deflated within hours.

China won this two decades ago, quietly, commercially, without firing a shot.

What happened in Beijing was not a diplomatic breakthrough. It was America finally admitting what the Indo-Pacific has known since the early 2000s.

China is not America's peer.

It is ahead.

The distinction matters.

America has two presidential cycles - six years - before the material reality becomes undeniable.

Before the weapons cannot be replaced.

Before the coalition it took for granted has finished repositioning.

Before the rare earths pipeline is gone and the countries that saw this coming twenty years ago have built their own arrangements with the power that actually controls the century

This is not abstract geopolitics.

It is happening right now, in real time, in the Strait of Hormuz.

And this week, the EU’s top diplomat said something that makes the picture complete …..

I've been waiting a full week for this.

On Sunday, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas spoke at the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia.

The former Estonian Prime Minister is the EU's top diplomat. She was speaking to a room of European security and foreign policy professionals.

She named three powers that prefer a divided Europe:

The United States. China. Russia.

"They don't like the European Union, that's very clear," she said. "But we need to understand why they don't like the EU; why China doesn't like the EU, why Russia doesn't. It is because if we stick together, if we operate together, then we are equal powers, we are strong."

She warned that the tactic was working. "The dividing is actually working. I'm very worried."

She wasn't sounding an alarm about three adversaries with different motivations who happen to produce the same outcome. She was doing something more precise. She was naming a tactic.

China hasn't fired a shot at the world and yet moves to dominate through economic leverage. Russia fires shots. The United States meddles and projects while imploding at home.

Three different instruments. One shared strategic preference.

A fragmented Europe that can be dealt with individually rather than faced as an equal power.

The 51-nation coalition has met twice. Trump has said nothing about it.

For a man who comments on everything, that silence is worth noting.

In my view it is possible - and I would go so far as to say probable - that the parallel American initiative is doing exactly what Kallas warned against today - pulling individual states toward bilateral arrangements rather than collective action.

"Why these powers want to dismantle the European Union is because we are much stronger when we are together."

Europe knows what divide and conquer looks like. It has a name for it now - and it has, for the first time, named who is doing it.

On the same day she spoke in Tallinn, EU defence ministers were meeting in Brussels.

Her assessment of the Strait was precise.

The Strait of Hormuz, she said, is caught in a grey zone between war and peace.

She noted that Operation ASPIDES - the EU's existing defensive naval mission, already operational in the region - could be extended to the Strait.

No new coalition. No new legal framework. No permission required from Washington.

Just a vote among EU member states to extend a mission that already exists, already has ships, and already has a mandate.

That is what defeating the tactic looks like in practice.

This series has identified three mechanisms: ITLOS. Uniting for Peace. ASPIDES extended to the Strait of Hormuz.

None require Washington's permission. None are subject to American veto. All three are available right now.

Today Kallas named the strategic context those three mechanisms sit inside.

A divided Europe is the preference of three powers simultaneously.

The counter to that preference is Europe operating as a single institutional actor using the frameworks it already has.

The legal architecture is in place. The coalition has the numbers. The institutional frameworks exist. My read of this board is that it ends with one or all three of these mechanisms coming into play.

The only question is which comes first.

Two arguments. One conclusion.

The Thucydides data tells us where we are in the arc:

A ruling power escalating as its capacity to escalate collapses.

Rare earth timelines that cannot be argued with. A transition already underway that no amount of military projection can reverse.

The Kallas speech tells us what the response looks like from inside the transition.

Middle powers building institutional frameworks that don't require American permission.

Europe naming, for the first time and in public, the tactic being used against it - and naming who is using it.

Kallas did not say the three powers are working together. She said they share a preference.

That is the tripartite framing - same destination, different roads.

China because a unified Europe is a trade bloc it has to negotiate with as an equal rather than pick off bilaterally.

Russia because a unified Europe is a security architecture it cannot intimidate piece by piece.

America because a unified Europe is a geopolitical power that Washington has to contend with rather than instruct.

The Strait of Hormuz is not the story. It is the symptom.

The story is what happens when a ruling power doesn't know it's losing, and the rest of the world has quietly decided to build around it anyway.

That process is not coming.

It is already underway.

aussiefemmebot writes from Melbourne, Australia, in a New York-style batchelorette apartment in Upper East Brunswick, where she lives with her sighthounds, Fletcher & Millie. She covers constitutional and international law — and the human consequences behind global politics.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

Iran asked an important legal question last week.

This piece follows on from ‘The Capstone’ series.

Parts One, Two and Three examined the legal framework for independent coalition action under UNCLOS, the convergent security architecture Europe is building without the United States, and the moment that architecture stopped being theoretical.

The series established the architecture.

This piece shows the architecture is needed right now.

Links:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

On Sunday, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi posted a statement on X.

It was addressed to France and the United Kingdom.

It said that the Strait of Hormuz is not the common property of extra-regional powers.

That only the Islamic Republic of Iran can establish security in the Strait.

That any deployment of foreign warships - or those of any country accompanying what Iran called the illegal actions of the United States - will be met with a decisive and immediate response from the armed forces of the Islamic Republic.

He went on to say: "Maritime security cannot be ensured through displays of military power; especially not by actors who, through their support, participation, or silence in the face of aggression and siege, are themselves part of the problems."

Within hours, French President Emmanuel Macron said France had never envisaged a naval deployment into the Strait itself.

Gharibabadi's statement is not a provocation.

It is a question.

A legitimate legal question that the UK/France-led coalition has not yet answered.

Under what authority ?

The coalition exists.

On Tuesday, 12 May, the defence ministers of more than 40 nations met virtually, co-chaired by the UK and France, to finalise military contributions to a mission that has no legal mandate Iran is obliged to respect.

Ships are in position.

The Charles de Gaulle carrier group has transited the Suez Canal.

HMS Dragon is forward-deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Italy has offered frigates.

Germany has indicated willingness to contribute.

Eleven members of the coalition have not been publicly named.

The mission has been described as defensive. Independent. Strictly limited to escorting commercial vessels once a sustainable ceasefire is in place.

Iran has said it will defend its waters against foreign military deployment during an active war on its territory.

Macron's retreat on Sunday is not a change of position. It is an acknowledgement of the problem the coalition has not yet solved.

France will not put ships in the Strait without legal cover Iran is obliged to recognise.

A joint statement signed by 51 countries is not that cover. A ministerial communiqué is not that cover. A mission described as defensive and coordinated does not become legal simply because the countries conducting it say so.

Iran's coastal state sovereignty claim - made in writing, by a senior official, on Sunday - is a legal assertion. It requires a legal answer.

There are two available.

Neither requires Washington's permission.

Neither can be vetoed by the United States.

The first is ITLOS - the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

Under Part XV of UNCLOS, states parties can file for provisional measures.

The threshold is urgency and the risk of serious harm to the rights of the parties pending a final ruling.

Both are plainly met.

The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since 28 February. Gharibabadi's statement establishes that Iran intends to maintain that position by force.

Trump's own public statements establish that the US blockade will remain until Iran accepts terms Tehran has called a surrender.

Under Part XV of UNCLOS, state parties can bring competing legal claims before ITLOS for adjudication. Iran’s coastal state sovereignty claim on one side. Transit passage rights on the other.

The tribunal exists precisely to resolve that tension without warships deciding the outcome.

Transit passage is not innocent passage.

It is not discretionary. It is a right that attaches to international straits used for international navigation.

The Strait of Hormuz qualifies on every criterion.

Iran is a party to UNCLOS. The US is not.

That asymmetry matters.

The US cannot sit at that table. The US cannot block that filing. The US cannot challenge the jurisdiction of a tribunal it has never joined.

Provisional measures can be ordered within weeks.

Once that order exists, the legal geometry changes entirely.

A state escorting a vessel through the Strait is no longer defying Iran's sovereignty claim.

It is complying with a binding order of an international tribunal.

Iran's "decisive and immediate response" would then constitute a response to a lawful act conducted under international legal authority.

Gharibabadi's statement on Sunday is not an obstacle to that filing.

It is the evidence base for it.

The second mechanism operates at the General Assembly.

Resolution 377A - Uniting for Peace - was adopted in 1950 precisely for this situation.

When the Security Council is paralysed by veto and fails to act in a case of a threat to international peace and security, the General Assembly can convene in emergency special session and recommend collective measures.

The Security Council is paralysed.

The United States is a permanent member and a belligerent party.

It has vetoed, or will veto, any resolution that constrains its operations or confers legitimacy on the coalition acting independently of it.

That is not a political judgment. It is a structural fact.

The Security Council has passed resolutions demanding Iran reopen the Strait.

It has not passed a single resolution demanding the United States and Israel cease the military campaign that caused Iran to close it.

It has not passed a resolution on the assassination of a head of state during active negotiations.

It has not passed a resolution on the covert strikes by Gulf states on Iranian territory.

It has not passed a resolution on a dual blockade that the International Energy Agency has described as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

The Uniting for Peace mechanism requires nine votes in the Security Council to convene, or a majority of UN member states.

With 51 countries already publicly committed to the coalition, and a global majority watching energy prices destroy their economies, watching fertiliser shortages worsen famines, watching currencies destabilise across Southeast Asia - that majority is not a theoretical possibility.

It is available today.

The General Assembly cannot compel military action.

What it can do is recommend it.

And a UNGA recommendation, backed by a two-thirds majority, does something the joint ministerial statement cannot do.

It gives the coalition's mission the authority of the international community rather than the authority of the states conducting it.

It also solves the problem of the eleven unnamed members.

A UNGA resolution gives every state cover to be publicly associated with the mission. They are no longer joining a coalition Iran has warned it will respond to.

They are implementing a recommendation of the General Assembly.

Macron said France will not act in a framework that seems unclear.

A UNGA resolution and an ITLOS provisional measures order are not unclear.

They are the two clearest legal instruments available to states acting without US participation and within a framework Iran is legally obliged to engage with.

The two tracks are not alternatives.

They are cumulative.

The ITLOS order addresses Iran's legal claim directly.

It establishes that transit passage rights exist, that they are being violated, and that states acting to restore them are acting lawfully.

The Uniting for Peace resolution addresses the political mandate.

It converts the coalition from a group of states acting in their own interests into the operational expression of a General Assembly recommendation.

Together they do what the ministerial communiqué cannot.

They place the entire operation inside international law rather than alongside it.

The coalition has ships. It has legal standing under UNCLOS. It has the numbers for a UNGA majority.

It has, as of Sunday, a written statement from a senior Iranian official that constitutes the evidentiary foundation for an urgent ITLOS filing.

On the same day as the coalition meeting, EU High Representative Kaja Kallas told a press conference that the Strait of Hormuz is caught in “a grey zone between war and peace”.

She noted that Operation ASPIDES - the EU's existing defensive naval mission, already operational in the region - could be extended to the Strait.

No decision was announced.

Three institutions.

Three legal paths.

Three ways to circumvent a Security Council paralysed by the vote of a permanent member that is itself the belligerent.

None requiring Washington's permission.

None subject to American veto.

Iran has been waiting six days for an answer.

The answer is: the architects of the UN anticipated exactly this moment.

They built three separate escape routes from Security Council paralysis.

All three are available right now.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

In 1507, the Portuguese arrived at the Strait of Hormuz and immediately understood something the rest of the world would spend five centuries arguing about.

The overland Silk Road that had carried trade between East and West for a thousand years was finished.

Whoever held that water now held the only route that mattered - a naval route.

So they built a fortress on Hormuz Island.

They collected tolls.

They called it civilisation.

Five hundred years later, the Americans arrived at the same conclusion by a different route and called it freedom of navigation.

The logic is identical. The branding improved.

What we are watching in May 2026 is not a war.

Or rather - it is a war, but that is the least interesting thing about it. Wars end.

What doesn't end is the argument about who the Persian Gulf belongs to, and who has the right to name the terms of passage through it.

That argument is three thousand years old.

America is two hundred and fifty years old.

These are not evenly matched claimants.

If you stepped back far enough - far enough that the noise of this particular week dropped away and you could see the shape of things - you would see a civilisation that has been governing this waterway since before the concept of the nation-state existed, being asked by a country younger than some of its universities to accept that it has no sovereign rights there.

Persia gave the world its first human rights charter. Cyrus the Great. 539 BCE.

Oil was only discovered in Iran in 1908.

What followed was a hundred and twenty years of extractions, interventions, and deals done in rooms that Iran was not invited into.

The United States gave the world the Monroe Doctrine, and has been expanding its definition of the Monroe Doctrine's geography ever since.

The “love tap” is the latest entry in a ledger that has been running since before anyone currently in the White House was born.

On May 7, 2026 - one day after a ceasefire resolution was tabled at the United Nations Security Council, while negotiations were still active and the vote was still pending - the United States struck five locations along the Iranian coastline.

There is a legal term for striking a sovereign nation the day after you have tabled a UN resolution, asking that nation to stand down, while the vote is still pending.

It is not self-defence.

It is a message to the Security Council.

The UN Secretary-General election is coming.

A new secretary general who understands what Article 99 is for changes the institutional architecture of everything that follows.

The Uniting for Peace mechanism - predicted, available, unused for decades - sits behind that.

The global majority that referred Netanyahu to the ICC and kept the court functioning under sanctions is the same global majority that votes on who runs the United Nations.

These are not separate stories.

The Gulf states are now picking sides in the way that states actually pick sides - not with declarations but with contracts, currencies, and quietly shifted relationships.

The de-dollarisation that was theoretical three years ago is operational now.

The Gulf states are watching US /Israel moves and saying very little in public, which is itself a move.

The board is shifting.

Not because anyone has won.

Because enough pieces have moved that the old positions are no longer tenable.

The question for the Gulf was never whether to move. It was whether Iran would give enough diplomatic cover to do it without being seen to choose.

This is what a tipping point looks like from inside it. Messy. Incremental. Easy to misread as stalemate.

Iran is watching three countries - the United States, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates - moving into positions that look, from Tehran, less like an air campaign and more like a prelude to something that comes ashore.

If that reading is correct, a forty-five square kilometre oil slick drifting southwest toward UAE coastline on northwesterly winds is not an accident.

It is preparation.

A country with a hundred and twenty years of experience running oil operations at Kharg does not spill forty-five square kilometres by accident.

A civilisation that has been defending that coastline for three thousand years has a different relationship to consequence than one that has been projecting power across it for seventy.

They are preparing for the UN to pass a resolution that signals obstruction of international law.

The Gulf states didn't sign up for this.

They signed up for American protection. What they got was American forward operations launched from their soil, and Iranian missiles coming back the other way. That is a different transaction than the one they thought they were in.

And now there is an oil facility that may or may not have been struck by Israel - Iran says it wasn't them, and they are usually precise about what they claim - and the Gulf states are trying to work out who just hit their infrastructure and whether the country that was supposed to prevent that is the same country that made it a target.

That is the question sitting over the Persian Gulf this Sunday morning.

Not who wins. Not what Trump posts next. But whether the states that have hosted American bases, processed American logistics, and quietly facilitated American operations have just discovered that protection and utility are not the same thing.

Iran already knows the answer to that question. It has known for a hundred and twenty years.

The Gulf states are working it out in real time.

The Gulf states are co-drafting the resolution with America not because they have chosen America, but because it is the only room currently open to them.

Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar are all at the table.

They are also all still watching what lands on their soil and trying to work out who sent it.

When Russia and China veto this resolution - and a previous Bahrain draft was already vetoed once - the Security Council exhausts itself as a mechanism.

That is not the end of the process.

It is the beginning of a different one.

A veto in the Security Council triggers the conditions for Uniting for Peace - a General Assembly mechanism that has sat largely unused for decades, that bypasses the veto entirely, and that hands the agenda to the global majority.

The same global majority that referred Netanyahu to the ICC.

The same global majority that votes on who becomes the next Secretary-General.

The same global majority that has been watching a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old country strike a three-thousand-year-old civilisation during a ceasefire vote and call it a love tap.

That is the institution coming up behind.

It moves slowly.

But it is already moving.

David Hearst, editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye, has been watching the same board and arriving at the same conclusion from a different angle.

Regime change has failed.

The Islamic Republic is more in control of its own territory than it was before the first strike.

Trump has hit a brick wall - a renewed war destroys Gulf infrastructure, and a peace deal that doesn't include the surrender of Iran's missiles and drones is not the peace deal Washington is looking for.

Neither option is available.

What Iran has done instead is burst what Hearst calls the fragile bubble of Gulf wealth.

More than a hundred and twenty billion dollars wiped from UAE stock exchanges.

Aluminium production halted.

The tourist and gold markets of Dubai and Abu Dhabi deeply damaged.

The UAE was targeted because Iranian intelligence concluded Abu Dhabi had become an advanced platform for Israeli interests.

That conclusion is not wrong.

Israeli air defence systems are already deployed there.

A formal military pact between the UAE and Israel already exists in everything but name.

Mohammed bin Zayed is now pulling the UAE out of OPEC in a calculated move to damage Saudi Arabia.

The region is fracturing not just between America and Iran but between the Gulf states themselves.

Which is why Hearst's conclusion matters.

Major regional powers, he says, must urgently form a security pact - not to contain Iran, but to contain Israel and its Emirati ally.

That is a different board entirely to the one most people think they are watching.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 17 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

Iran isn't asking for anything the law doesn't already say it's owed.

Those of you who've been reading this Substack for a while will know that reparations have been on my radar since the early weeks of this war.

Not as a wish, not as a political position - as an international law inevitability.

When a state is subjected to an illegal war of aggression, the legal framework for what comes next already exists.

It was written before any of this happened.

The International Law Commission's Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA), a framework developed by the body that operates under the UN General Assembly and is responsible for developing and codifying international law - are unambiguous.

A state responsible for an internationally wrongful act must make full reparation for the injury caused.

That covers restitution, monetary compensation, and guarantees of non-repetition.

The UN Charter Article 2(4) - the provision that prohibits member states from using force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state - is equally clear.

More than 100 US-based international law experts, professors and former Judge Advocates General have already said publicly that the February 28 strikes violated it.

The analysts reaching pro-Iran conclusions on reparations aren't Iran sympathisers. They're just reading what's on the page.

So what's changed this week is not the legal argument. The legal argument was always there.

What's changed is that Iran is now collapsing the entire negotiating architecture into a single instrument - and it's a move worth understanding clearly.

Analysts have identified four pathways by which Iran could be compensated as part of any deal that reopens the Strait of Hormuz:

• Reparations

• Tolling

• The unblocking of frozen assets, and

• Sanctions relief

Iran holds somewhere north of $100 billion in frozen assets abroad.

Sanctions relief would allow it back into international markets.

Tolling would generate ongoing revenue from the one chokepoint it physically controls.

And reparations are the legally correct remedy for the destruction of $270 billion in estimated direct and indirect damages.

Iran's parliament is now moving to codify all of this into domestic law.

Under the proposed framework, Israeli vessels are permanently excluded.

Ships from hostile nations - read: the United States - must pay war reparations to obtain a transit permit.

All other vessels require Iranian authorisation.

And the payments, for friendly nations, are already operating in Chinese yuan and crypto.

The demand for payment in Iranian currency is the part that deserves the most attention.

It does three things simultaneously -

One:

It forces partial recognition of the rial as a legitimate transaction currency - directly undercutting the sanctions architecture that has been deliberately collapsing it.

(Scott Bessent admitted before Congress in February that the US intentionally created a dollar shortage in Iran to trigger bank runs and currency collapse).

Demanding rial payment for Hormuz transit is the structural counter to that.

Two:

It forces the rial back into international transaction legitimacy through the one mechanism Iran physically controls.

Three:

It also generates hard domestic currency reserves at a moment when Iran needs them most.

It asserts Iranian sovereignty over the strait in the most concrete form possible. You don't pay a toll to a waterway you have freedom of navigation through. You pay reparations to the sovereign whose territory you damaged.

What Iran has done is collapse reparations, tolling, sanctions circumvention, and sovereign recognition into a single legal and financial instrument.

That's not improvisation.

That's a negotiating architecture that leaves the United States two choices - accept Iranian monetary sovereignty over the strait, or stay out permanently.

Trump may not comply.

That's worth saying plainly.

But compliance is not the only measure of whether Iran wins this argument.

Under international law, Iran's cause is strong.

The framework was already there.

Iran is just using it.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 18 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

There is a game being played in the Strait of Hormuz. It is not the game Washington is describing.

To understand who holds what, start with the territory.

IRAN

Iran controls the strait.

Not partially, not nominally - physically.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps published a map on 4 May 2026 defining the boundaries of Iranian armed forces control over the waterway.

Those boundaries encompass the entire navigable channel from the point where Iranian and Omani territorial waters overlap in the west to the same overlap point in the east. There is no neutral gap. There has never been a neutral gap.

Every ship that has ever transited the Strait of Hormuz has done so in somebody's territorial waters - and the somebody with the most water is Iran.

Iran has used that territorial reality to construct a managed transit regime. Ships wishing to pass through the strait coordinate with Iranian armed forces, transit the northern corridor along the Iranian coastline, and in some cases pay a fee.

CHINA

China holds the Iranian supply line.

China has been moving vessels through this corridor since early March - bulk carriers broadcasting Chinese ownership, LPG tankers broadcasting Muslim and Turkish operation [1].

Iran carved out Chinese access explicitly and early. That was not an accident. That was a territorial alliance expressed through maritime practice.

Before the war, China was already Iran's largest oil customer and primary economic lifeline. Since the war began and the US naval blockade of Iranian ports commenced on 13 April, that relationship has become existential for Tehran [2].

China's access through the strait is guaranteed. China's oil supply from Iran continues. And China has leverage over both Iran and the United States simultaneously - leverage it is carefully managing ahead of its own diplomatic calendar.

RUSSIA

Russia holds the information space.

When Iran's state media claimed two missiles struck a US Navy vessel near Jask Island on 4 May, the United States denied it. Russian outlets named the ship - the USS Canberra, LCS-30, an Independence-class littoral combat ship based in Bahrain and confirmed operating in the Arabian Sea enforcing the blockade [3].

Russia naming the specific hull number is not journalism. It is a signal - to Iran, to the watching world, and to Washington - that American denials do not control the narrative.

Russia cannot intervene militarily in the strait. It can ensure that American information management has limits.

PAKISTAN

Pakistan holds the back-channel.

Every substantive communication between Washington and Tehran since the ceasefire was brokered on 8 April has moved through Islamabad [4].

Pakistan's Field Marshal Asim Munir maintained overnight contact with the American negotiating team and with Foreign Minister Araghchi in the hours before Trump paused Project Freedom on 5 May.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif publicly thanked Trump for the pause, citing requests from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other brotherly countries.

Pakistan is not a neutral mediator. Pakistan is a player with its own strategic interests in regional stability, its own relationships with both Iran and the Gulf states, and its own leverage over the pace and shape of any agreement.

AMERICA

Now look at the American hand.

The United States has military dominance in the airspace over the strait. It has guided-missile destroyers, over 100 aircraft, armed helicopters, A-10 attack jets and 15,000 personnel deployed in the region [5].

It has a naval blockade of Iranian ports that is costing Tehran significant oil revenue. It has the threat of resuming full-scale strikes if negotiations fail.

What it does not have is a functioning diplomatic operation capable of converting that military pressure into a deal.

The Islamabad talks in April failed.

The American negotiating team arrived, produced no agreement, and left [6]. The ceasefire has been extended repeatedly not because of American diplomatic skill but because Pakistan keeps asking for more time and Trump keeps saying yes - while simultaneously announcing military operations like Project Freedom that undercut the diplomatic space Pakistan is trying to hold open.

Project Freedom itself lasted less than 48 hours before Trump paused it at Pakistan's request. In that time, two American-flagged merchant ships transited the strait. Two. Against the hundreds Trump claimed were waiting to move.

The operation that was supposed to demonstrate American resolve demonstrated instead that shipping companies, insurers and flag states do not trust Washington's assurances enough to put their vessels and crews into a contested military operation [7].

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, meanwhile, is in Beijing.

His message to Wang Yi: "facts have proven that the political crisis cannot be resolved through military means" [8].

That is not the statement of a government under pressure to concede.

That is the statement of a government that has watched its adversary's military operation produce two ship transits and a pause in 48 hours, and has drawn the obvious conclusion.

The board does not lie.

Iran holds the territory that matters. Its allies hold the supply lines, the information space and the back-channel.

The American negotiating team is attempting to convert overwhelming military force into a diplomatic outcome in a game where military force has already been tried, has already failed to produce surrender, and has already been paused twice at the request of a third party.

That is not strength. That is a very expensive stalemate dressed up as momentum.

As this piece was being written, reports emerged that the United States and Iran are closing in on a memorandum of understanding to end the war - with the release of frozen Iranian assets as a central condition

[Al Jazeera, 6 May 2026].

The figure currently on the table is $20 billion.

The US opened at $6 billion. Iran demanded $27 billion. Twenty billion is where negotiations now sit.

[Axios, 17 April 2026; CNN, 17 April 2026].

Iran's frozen assets belong to Iran.

The ICJ said so.

This is not a surprise to regular readers of this archive.

In “I can make your blood run cold. And I need you to let me” and "The Trapdoor", published before Operation Epic Fury commenced, I argued that the ICJ compensation schedule - handed down 25 February 2026, three days before the bombs fell - was not background noise.

It was the legal architecture Iran would convert into negotiating leverage.

The ICJ is preparing to name a figure. That process will unfold through 2026 and into 2027 depending on the schedule.

The figure now on the table is $20 billion.

That may be what America can negotiate bilaterally under pressure.

But the ICJ case remains open. Iran has not withdrawn.

If these talks collapse, Iran goes back to The Hague - and the court's figure may be considerably larger.

In The Trapdoor I wrote: "A few billion dollars in compensation to Iran is not the point. The point is what happens when the precedent is set."

The precedent is being set right now.

At a negotiating table in Islamabad.

In real time.

Mediated by Pakistan.

With China watching from Beijing and Russia watching from the information space and the Northwood Coalition watching from its own independent architecture.

Iran held the territory.

It held the legal position.

It held the strait.

And it may be walking away from this war with its frozen assets, its corridor, and a precedent that every country on the wrong end of American economic warfare is already studying.

That is not a stalemate.

That is what winning through law and geography looks like.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

[1] Wikipedia, 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Strait_of_Hormuz_crisis

[2] Reuters/AP, US naval blockade of Iranian ports, 13 April 2026 - multiple outlets

[3] Pravda Australia, USS Canberra LCS-30 identification, 4 May 2026 - https://au.news-pravda.com/australia/2026/05/04/31325.html

[4] Wikipedia, 2026 Iran war ceasefire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war_ceasefire

[5] CENTCOM statement on Project Freedom assets, 3 May 2026 - cited in CNN, Brad Lendon, 4 May 2026

[6] Wikipedia, 2026 Iran war ceasefire - Islamabad talks failure, 12 April 2026

[7] ABC News/NPR live updates, Project Freedom pause, 5 May 2026 - https://abcnews.com/International/live-updates/iran-live-updates

[8] CNBC, Araghchi-Wang Yi Beijing meeting, 6 May 2026 - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/06/china-iran-araghchi-wang-yi-trump-beijing-hormuz-talks.html

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 18 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

He stood down.

In Part 1 of this series Eight Ships and a Legal Fiction, I showed how CENTCOM’s official account of transit through the Strait of Hormuz is consistently contradicted by AIS data.

The gap between what “interdiction” was claimed and what the data shows was the argument.

This is Part 2.

You cannot “interdict’ the strait itself.

The argument scales up from the ships to the waterway.

The gap this time is on the map - or rather, the gap that isn't there at all.

On 4 May 2026, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy published this map.

It defines the area of the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian armed forces control - bounded in the west by a line between the westernmost tip of Qeshm Island and the UAE emirate of Umm al-Qaiwain, and in the east by a line between Iran's Mount Mobarak and the UAE's emirate of Fujairah.

Those are the two orange vertical lines.

This map is not new intelligence.

It is not a provocation.

It is the legal argument Iran has been making since before this war began, rendered visible for an audience that has been refusing to read the law.

The IRGC has published, as a military declaration, the same jurisdictional framework I have been developing across this archive.

The day after this map was published, there was a skirmish on the southern approach to the strait.

Shots were fired across the bow of a US vessel.

That was not random.

That was the IRGC enforcing the map in real time.

The message was precise: if you attempt to route ships through the Larak corridor from the south, you are entering Iranian territorial waters without authorisation, and you will be treated accordingly.

Trump paused Project Freedom the same day, citing a request from Pakistan.

Pakistan has been the back-channel between Washington and Tehran throughout this conflict.

What Pakistan put on the table was the map.

What the map says is: you do not have the legal or military position to contest this without a full war.

Now look at what the map is actually showing you.

The Jurisdictional Foundation

Those two orange vertical lines mark the points where the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea limits of Iran to the north and Oman to the south stop overlapping - where the strait proper begins and ends.

Inside those two lines is the choke point where both states' territorial waters cover the entire width of the waterway.

There is no neutral gap.

Every ship that has ever transited the Strait of Hormuz has been in somebody's territorial waters the entire time.

The question has never been whether to transit sovereign waters.

The question has always been whose sovereign waters, on whose terms, and under what legal authority.

Whose waters ?

The Larak-Qeshm corridor - the channel between Qeshm Island and the Iranian mainland - is not a deviation from the standard route.

It is the standard route.

Terra Nullius at Sea

Terra Nullius at Sea - Part Two: Iran's Shopping Mall

When Iran redirected shipping into that corridor and began charging passage fees, it was not seizing a waterway.

It was administering one it already owned.

There is a third channel between the islands themselves that does not appear on this map - also Iranian internal waters.

On whose terms ?

Neither Iran nor the United States has ratified UNCLOS.

Both signed. Neither ratified.

When Washington invokes the transit passage regime to justify military operations in the strait, it is citing a treaty it has never ratified against a state that has never ratified it

That is not international law. That is a press release. On “truth” social.

The Oman corridor

The purple shaded area on the map is Omani territory - the Musandam Peninsula.

The alternative routing being quietly developed runs ships through Omani waters, coordinated through Omani authorities.

Oman has not left the picture.

Oman is the picture

How to Invoke Article 5 & Not Involve the USA - Part 3: The EU Knows Exactly What It's Doing

That process was underway before Project Freedom was announced.

The skirmish on the southern approach on 5 May confirmed why ships cannot simply route through the Larak corridor without Iranian authorisation - that corridor is Iranian internal waters, and the IRGC is now enforcing it with live fire.

Under what legal authority ?

The 51-nation coalition that met in London is not a NATO operation.

It is a convergent action framework - states acting in parallel under their own legal authorities, deliberately constructed to exclude the United States because the United States is a party to the conflict.

The Capstone

How to Invoke Article 5 & Not Involve the USA - Part 2: The Scenario to Watch

The Northwood Coalition is functional NATO without America.

How to Invoke Article 5 & Not Involve the USA - Shhh ... !

Mark Carney said it plainly in Yerevan this week: the international order will be rebuilt out of Europe.

The Capstone, In Real Time

The court record

The Rome Statute does not require US ratification to apply to US conduct.

ICC jurisdiction follows the territory where the crime is committed and the nationality of the victims.

Iran Should Go to the ICC - Here's Why They'd Win

The Article 15 referral mechanism allows any individual in any of the 125 states parties to trigger a preliminary examination.

This prayer has an answer.

The court is already functioning under US sanctions. It will continue to function.

Three days before Operation Epic Fury commenced, the ICJ handed down its compensation schedule in Certain Iranian Assets.

The sequencing is evidentiary, not coincidental

I can make your blood run cold. And I need you to let me.

The Trapdoor.

The mining question

Iran mined its own territorial waters.

A sovereign state has the right to mine its own territory when it is the party under attack.

The United States began bombing Iran on 28 February 2026.

The mining followed.

US demining operations inside Iranian territorial waters are not humanitarian.

They are an act of war conducted inside another state's sovereign jurisdiction.

Now look at the map again.

The orange lines have not moved. They were always there. The legal framework was always there.

Iran published this map on 4 May 2026 and enforced it with live fire on 5 May 2026.

The war did not create these arguments.

It confirmed them.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 18 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

When the most powerful military in the world cannot persuade its closest allies to join a naval coalition in a strait it has effectively closed itself, the problem is not the allies.

"You know who else didn't help us ? South Korea didn't help us. You know who else didn't help us ? Australia didn't help us. You know who else didn't help us ? Japan."

Donald Trump, White House press conference, 6 April 2026.

He was not finished.

"Japan didn't help us, Australia didn't help us, South Korea didn't help us, and then you get to NATO, NATO didn't help us."

He then noted the 50,000 American soldiers in Japan and 45,000 in South Korea, deployed to protect those nations from North Korea.

The implication was transactional and unmistakable:

“You owe us.”

What Trump did not explain - what he has never explained - is what exactly he was asking these countries to join.

Around the same time, Australia's Prime Minister said something quietly different.

Words to the effect that Australia is not in a “monogamous relationship” with Washington.

That we are ,”dating in our own region”.

It was diplomatic understatement doing a lot of work.

What Albanese was describing, in the language of alliance management, is a sovereign country declining to be owned.

Both statements were made in the same week.

One demands loyalty.

The other asserts independence.

Only one of them reflects a coherent strategic position.

The US Maritime Freedom Construct exists as a diplomatic cable.

Secretary Rubio approved it.

US embassies were instructed to deliver the request orally to partner nations by May 1 - not in writing, not as a formal treaty proposal, orally.

What the construct does not have is a legal framework that non-US states can stand on, an operational boundary that limits escalation risk, a command architecture that preserves sovereign decision-making, or a coherent objective that does not directly contradict the American naval blockade of Iranian ports running alongside it.

You cannot ask allies to join a freedom of navigation mission while your own navy is blockading the same waterway.

Every state asked to participate has to answer domestically for that contradiction.

That is not a coalition architecture.

That is a request to share the legal and political costs of a war those states did not start and did not endorse.

Compare it to what the UK and France have actually built.

Forty-one countries attended the April 2 virtual summit chaired by UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper.

The mission is explicitly defensive.

It defers any operational mandate to the post-ceasefire period.

It will not act without conditions that protect against escalation.

Critically, it operates under UNCLOS - the international legal framework that gives every participating state a sovereign legal basis for its own contribution, without subordinating that state to anyone else's command decisions or anyone else's war.

Australia attended that summit.

Japan attended.

India attended.

They did so because the architecture is sound.

The states that declined the American request did not do so out of disloyalty or timidity.

Germany said there was no convincing plan and Washington had not consulted them.

France said they were not party to the conflict.

Australia, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union all declined on 16 March, citing the lack of strategic goals or reluctance to be drawn into the war.

The Asian states with the greatest direct stake in Hormuz transit - China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, the Philippines - are not inside any Western coalition at all.

They have either negotiated bilateral transit access directly with Iran or are rerouting supply chains through alternative corridors.

Iran allowed ships from China, Russia, India, Iraq and Pakistan to transit.

Malaysian and Thai vessels were granted access after direct talks with Tehran.

These countries made a rational sovereign calculation: the American construct offered them nothing and would cost them their relationships with Iran.

This is the fact Trump's framing cannot absorb.

Eighty-four percent of the oil that normally transits Hormuz is destined for Asian markets.

The states carrying that dependence looked at the Maritime Freedom Construct and said no.

Not because they lack courage.

Because the construct does not serve their interests and asks them to align with a blockade that violates the same international law they are being invited to uphold.

Meanwhile Australia and Japan are doing something more useful.

This week in Canberra, Prime Ministers Albanese and Takaichi affirmed they would closely communicate with each other in responding to the Hormuz crisis with a sense of urgency, signing agreements on energy security, defence, and critical minerals.

Australia provides roughly a third of Japan's LNG.

That bilateral relationship, built on mutual economic dependence and shared legal frameworks, is a more durable foundation for Indo-Pacific energy security than any American-commanded mission that asks participating states to leave their sovereignty at the door.

Trump praised the Gulf states - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain - for being good partners.

What he did not mention is that not one of them joined his coalition either.

Saudi Arabia, the country with more crude oil trapped behind the Hormuz blockade than any other, stayed entirely outside every coalition structure while simultaneously hosting American forces at King Fahd Air Base.

That is not loyalty.

That is the most calculated hedge in the Gulf.

Everyone is hedging.

Everyone is acting in their own interest.

The difference is that some of them are doing it inside a legal framework that holds, and some of them are being lectured by a president whose own navy is blockading the strait he wants everyone else to open.

A coalition requires a legal basis, an operational boundary, a command architecture member states can accept, and an objective that does not contradict itself.

The Maritime Freedom Construct has none of these things.

That is why nobody is joining yours, Mr Trump.

Not because the world has abandoned you.

Because you have not built anything worth joining.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis. If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 18 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

On the same day the United States announced Project Freedom - its air cover operation in the Strait of Hormuz dressed as humanitarianism - the leaders of Europe and Canada were in Yerevan, Armenia, at the 8th European Political Community Summit saying something that deserves to be read carefully.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the first leader of a non-European nation invited to attend this summit, told the gathering that it is his "strong personal view" that the international order will be rebuilt.

And that it will be rebuilt out of Europe.

That is not a diplomatic pleasantry.

That is a structural argument about what replaces the architecture the United States is currently dismantling.

On the same day, French President Macron - also in Yerevan - stated that France would not participate in any military operation in the Strait of Hormuz in a framework that "seems unclear."

The broader European coalition, already assembled and already operating independently of Washington, held its line.

I have been arguing since ‘The Capstone’ pieces Part One & Part Two that Europe is building a functional security architecture that deliberately excludes the United States - not because Europe is anti-American in principle, but because the US is a belligerent party and the coalition's legal and operational integrity depends on that separation.

This is not a temporary workaround while America reconsiders its position.

It is the beginning of the replacement architecture - a functional security and political order with Europe at its foundation, capable of acting independently of Washington because it has to be.

Carney said it out loud today in Yerevan.

While America was announcing air cover operations and calling them charity.

The convergence is no longer analytical. It is happening.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis.

If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

From USD $5/month

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 18 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.

The United States does not have enough destroyers in the region to mount traditional convoy escort operations.

That is not my analysis - that is the assessment of former US Navy captain Carl Schuster, confirmed today by CNN's own military affairs reporter [1].

So if it is not a convoy escort, what is Project Freedom?

Jennifer Parker - nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute and former Royal Australian Navy officer - told CNN today that the operation is more likely to consist of armed helicopters flying over ships to take out small boats, and A-10 attack jets that could hit targets on the water or missile batteries ashore [1].

That is the operation the assets allow.

That, in Parker's own words, is "presence" - designed to make commercial vessels feel safe enough to move, not to physically protect them.

That framing matters.

Because what Parker is describing is air cover.

And air cover over the Strait of Hormuz, dressed up as a humanitarian gesture, is a very bad idea.

Here is why:

America has done this before.

In 1987, during the Iran-Iraq war, the United States ran Operation Earnest Will - the largest US naval convoy operation since the Second World War [2].

Even then, under far less compressed circumstances, things went catastrophically wrong.

The USS Stark was struck by Iraqi missiles on 17 May 1987, killing thirty-seven American sailors [3][4].

The USS Vincennes, operating under the tension and hair-trigger confusion of that environment, shot down Iran Air Flight 655 on 3 July 1988 - a civilian airliner on a scheduled commercial route from Bandar Abbas to Dubai - killing all 290 people on board, including 66 children [3][4][5].

That is what American air dominance over the Gulf produced last time.

Not safety.

Not humanitarianism.

Two of the worst maritime incidents of the twentieth century.

Now we are being asked to accept that Project Freedom is a humanitarian gesture.

Let us examine that claim.

The ships stranded in the Strait are there because the United States and Israel launched a war on 28 February 2026.

Iran's closure of the strait is a direct and logical response to an attack on its territory - not aberrant behaviour, not irrational belligerence, but the entirely predictable strategic response of a sovereign nation that has just been bombed.

Iran is not holding the world hostage.

Iran is holding a lever it was handed when the bombs started falling.

The crews on those stranded vessels are being cared for by their owners and operators under standard maritime obligation - the distress is real, but it is the distress of being at sea longer than anticipated, not of being under fire.

And here is the practical reality that no Washington press release will change - no P&I insurer is going to cover a vessel moving under American air cover through a mined waterway while Iran has declared it will attack any vessel participating in a US military operation [6][1].

No cover means no movement.

And the moment those vessels do move under that umbrella, they change category entirely - they are no longer stranded neutrals but participants in a US military operation.

Project Freedom takes crews who are not sitting ducks and makes them sitting ducks.

What nobody has produced is any evidence that the crews, their owners, or their insurers asked for any of this.

There is already a path being quietly built - one I outlined in Part 3 of this series "How to Invoke Article 5 & Not Involve the USA”

Operational guidance issued today by the US-led Joint Maritime Information Centre is directing vessels toward Omani waters and urging coordination with Omani authorities [7] - tacitly acknowledging what I argued there: that Oman is not out of the picture.

Oman is the picture.

Project Freedom has now inserted American airpower into the space that process was occupying.

And here is the tripwire - the one discussed across all four parts of "How to Invoke Article 5 & Not Involve the USA"

Iran's military chief Ali Abdollahi Aliabadi stated today that any foreign armed force approaching the Strait of Hormuz will be attacked [6].

Iran has also declared that any US military operation in the strait constitutes a ceasefire violation.

As this piece is being written, Iran's state media is reporting that two missiles struck a US frigate near Jask [8].

The US is denying it [7].

Neither account is independently verified - but the shape of what was always going to happen is already visible.

France understands this.

Speaking today at a European leaders summit in Yerevan, President Macron called for a coordinated reopening by the United States and Iran, and stated directly that France would not participate in any military operation in a framework that "seems unclear" [9].

The broader European coalition - already assembled, already planning, already explicitly independent of Washington and the belligerent parties - has built its mission around a post-ceasefire defensive architecture.

That coalition excludes the United States because the United States is a party to this conflict.

How to Invoke Article 5 & Not Involve the USA

There is one final irony worth naming.

In 1987, the United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers as American vessels specifically to bring them under military protection - flag conferred legitimacy, and legitimacy conferred the escort [2].

Today, the United States is intercepting and boarding vessels on the basis of Iranian connection or adjacency.

The same doctrine that once said flag equals protection now says flag equals suspicion.

America invented the reflagging logic and is now running it in reverse against the very category of neutral shipping it once claimed to champion.

aussiefemmebot publishes independent geopolitical and international law analysis.

If this piece was useful to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support ongoing coverage of the Iran conflict and its legal dimensions.

From USD $5/month

Sources

[1] Brad Lendon, CNN, “Trump’s new plan to ‘guide’ merchant ships through Hormuz leaves many questions unanswered,” 4 May 2026 - https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/04/middleeast/project-freedom-hormuz-guide-ships-intl-hnk-ml

[2] Wikipedia, Operation Earnest Will - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Will

[3] Wikipedia, Iran Air Flight 655 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

[4] History.com, “U.S. warship downs Iranian passenger jet,” 3 July 1988 - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-3/u-s-warship-downs-iranian-passenger-jet

[5] Encyclopaedia Britannica, Iran Air Flight 655 - https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655

[6] Times of Israel, “Iran threatens American ships if they enter Hormuz,” 4 May 2026 - https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-threatens-american-ships-if-they-enter-hormuz-as-us-kicks-off-project-freedom/

[7] CBS News live updates, 4 May 2026 - https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/iran-war-trump-strait-of-hormuz-ship-attack-threat-peace-proposal/

[8] Al Jazeera live blog, 4 May 2026 - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2026/5/4/iran-war-live-tehran-says-trumps-hormuz-mission-violates-ceasefire

[9] Al Jazeera, Macron statement, 4 May 2026 - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2026/5/4/iran-war-live-tehran-says-trumps-hormuz-mission-violates-ceasefire

Help keep this going for USD $5.00 --->

You’ll be supporting independent legal and political analysis from an Australian perspective that refuses to centre American frameworks.

This newsletter is independent and reader-supported. If my writing has been useful to you, you can buy me a coffee - no sign up, no commitment, simply a one-off contribution - that goes directly toward building out my media studio and keeping two rescued greyhounds in comfort. Every bit helps.

Hit that subscribe button.

Share this with someone.

Leave a comment - I actually read them and respond.

And if you’re on Spoutible, find me there where I’m tracking all this in real time.

I am 18 Correspondents away from finishing my media studio and putting out the most serious work of my life. If you subscribe to my Correspondent Level you’ll get exclusive access to deeper dives.

Correspondents subscribe annually at $80 USD.

Browse the archive - there’s plenty there on international law, Westminster systems vs American exceptionalism, and what happens when a non-party state faces binding treaty obligations.

The record doesn’t stop. Neither do I.