Iran war: The war pauses ‒ the uncertainty doesn’t
Wednesday, 8 April 2026
ANALYSIS: A two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran may come with an extraordinary catch - a potential toll on one of the world’s most critical shipping routes.
It is not clear at all what the current deal is, or what a negotiated end to the war might be. We know the US will cease bombing Tehran and key Iranian sites for two weeks in return for the Iranians dropping their weapons and the Strait of Hormuz being reopened.
Crucially, it is not known whether it will mean fuel tankers paying a toll to get through the strait. In line with US President Donald Trump’s general gangster tactics, which have seen him through life, he would have no problem with another gangster-run state collecting a kick-back in order to use its waters.
It comes on the day the Reserve Bank of New Zealand held the official cash rate steady at 2.25% and warned that some members of its powerful Monetary Policy Committee were considering whether an early rate hike was required to see off any potential medium-term inflation problem - as opposed to short-term and temporary inflation shocks.
The full 10-point idea put forward by Iran is clearly a non-starter - it includes the US paying reparations and reconstruction for the war. But Trump has said it is a workable starting point for future negotiations.
Either way, it looks like the bombing - and the death and disruption, and all the other terrible things that come from war - will stop for at least a couple of weeks.
At the time of writing, AP was reporting that Iran would be able to levy tolls on ships going through the strait. In the 10-point plan presented by the Iranians, it has been reported that the regime has proposed something like a $US2 million toll to get through the strait.
It is very hard to see - notwithstanding Trump - that the US political system would be prepared to cop that.
Freedom of the seas is something we all take for granted, but which has been under pressure in recent years, particularly from China in the South China Sea, where it claims that the so-called “nine-dash line” amounts to a historic Chinese claim over most of the sea — and its busy shipping lanes.
Although rejected by international tribunals, China has been building militarised islands over the past decade or so to help bolster that claim.
The US - and just about everyone else - will be very keen to ensure that tolls for using the sea do not become a way of extracting revenue from the powerful and venal, gumming up trade routes and making goods more expensive.
Prior to the conflict there were about 20 to 25 outbound oil tankers and about six to eight LNG tankers per day. At $US2 million per vessel, that could mean an extra $US60 million a day for the regime and Oman (presumably paid in valuable foreign currency, not rial).
The actual cost, of course isn’t actually the point, even if set at what some may regard as a reasonable level. It is the principle.
Allowing Iran to do this could truly be the thin end of a very large wedge.
So it may be that the ceasefire holds - but will tankers start cruising through again, and if so, when and in what quantity? At the moment, we simply do not know how commercial operators will respond to this latest development.
The ceasefire will also be a good test of just how much control the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps retains over Iran. If they do, and the regime wishes the ceasefire to hold, then it should. If the grip has loosened and there is now disagreement, the whole situation could get messy and risk descending into warlordism.
Add to that that Trump is also extremely unpredictable.
But that’s all speculative. One of the defining features of this war has been a lack of co-ordination with Iranians who are against the regime and a lack of decent intelligence about what it might take for the regime to fall.
And the reopening of the strait will not mean a return to the status quo, even if ships start travelling freely - or even with a levy - because of the damage to oil and LNG infrastructure.
So now we wait. The New Zealand central bank on Wednesday afternoon did say that it was expecting inflation to shoot up to 4.2% in the June quarter, but that number was obviously based on a number of assumptions about the conflict.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis also made the point that much of what the Monetary Policy Committee has had to base its deliberations on is already out of date. It is a fast-moving situation.
Hopefully this ceasefire is the beginning of the end of the war. And there is no doubt Iran’s military capacity has been degraded. But if this is the start of the end of the conflict, the real question is whether the US has made the world a safer or less safe place in the medium term - whether Iran will be left internally weaker, but enjoying greater authority over a previously free stretch of water.