President Trump’s much-touted cease-fire with Iran effectively collapsed on Monday as he ordered the reinstatement of a naval blockade and announced that he will impose tolls on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, despite his own administration’s position that such fees violate international law.
Mr. Trump’s actions came shortly after he formally notified Congress that fighting has resumed amid tit-for-tat attacks by both sides in recent days. U.S. forces conducted a third consecutive night of strikes against Iran on Monday, military officials announced.
As the cease-fire that he once hailed dissolved, Mr. Trump dismissed its importance, saying in a radio interview that such agreements “don’t mean much,” while outlining no new strategy for how to resolve the conflict.
The developments left the president without a clear path forward, given that neither bombs and missiles nor diplomatic negotiations have yielded a palatable outcome. Oil prices surged and stocks fell on news of the naval blockade and shipping tolls, increasing pressure again even as many Republican lawmakers have expressed worry about the economic toll and sought to put the focus back on domestic issues in advance of this fall’s midterm elections.
“The Hormuz Strait is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. He added: “The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’ but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World.”
The decision to charge shippers flies in the face of the administration’s own stance when Iran threatened to do the same. Even in recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s team has insisted that charging for safe passage in the strait was intolerable. “No country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month. “That is a normal that we will never be able to accept,” he said several weeks before that.
Mr. Trump made no effort in his social media post on Monday to explain how the new fees differ from the ones that Iran planned to impose, nor did he say how long they would be in effect. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about how the president reconciled his new position with his old position.
Mr. Trump said he would continue to order strikes against Iran, as he has threatened repeatedly over the past week. “We’re going to hit them very hard tonight, we’re going to hit them hard tomorrow and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it,” he said in an interview with the radio host Hugh Hewitt shortly before U.S. Central Command announced the latest strikes. “They have nothing. They have nothing going other than they have big mouths.”
Mr. Trump also said that he might bomb Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified site not far from Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Although he said “we see no activity there,” he said that “Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right in their front door.”
The U.S. Central Command, which manages military operations in the Middle East, said that it will resume enforcing the naval blockade against vessels transiting to or from Iranian ports and coastal areas at late Tuesday evening local time.
The letter that Mr. Trump sent Congress on Friday, obtained by The New York Times, formally acknowledged that he had resumed the active strikes that administration officials had previously said had been suspended. “At my direction, United States Armed Forces responded, commencing on July 7, 2026, with defensive strikes against targets within Iran including missile launch sites, air defenses, military maritime assets, military support, infrastructure, and command and control capabilities,” he said in the letter. He called the strikes “limited” and “measured.”
Both chambers of Congress have voted for separate resolutions under the War Powers Act directing Mr. Trump to either end the war or seek approval from lawmakers to continue it. But like other presidents before him, Mr. Trump has rejected lawmakers’ interpretation of the law and maintained that he has the authority to conduct military operations without congressional authorization.
In abandoning what it presented as a bedrock principle on free passage in the strait, analysts said that Mr. Trump has eviscerated his own argument that Iran has no right to charge fees and made clear that the real question for shippers was which power forces them to pay.
“Trump undermines whatever legitimacy we could have claimed,” said Robert Kagan, a longtime senior fellow on security issues at the Brookings Institution. “We were posturing as the defender of a global public good. We ask the Europeans to take huge risks to help us gain control of the strait so we can charge them for it?”
Energy companies were left to forecast what the new reality will mean for them and international players complained that the United States was now doing what it faulted Iran for trying to do. The International Maritime Organization, a U.N. agency, passed a resolution on Monday reaffirming that “passage through the Strait should remain free of any tolls and charges, in accordance with international law.”
For its part, Iran mocked Mr. Trump for his about-face. “POTUS is absolutely right,” Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, wrote on social media, using the acronym for president of the United States. “Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service. Iran has always been the GUARDIAN of the Strait and will remain so FOREVER. 20% is of course too much. We will be fair.”
The fate of the strait has vexed Mr. Trump since he opened the war against Iran in February as Tehran has demonstrated its ability to choke off a passage through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas pass through. The strait, in effect, has become Iran’s most potent weapon, leaving Mr. Trump struggling to find ways to return the shipping there to its prewar status quo.
The president’s hope that the cease-fire would resolve the issue foundered in part on the language of the deal itself, which said that Iran would “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels,” a phrase that it has interpreted as acknowledging its control.
While Mr. Trump has authorized new strikes, there was little sense that they would necessarily change Iran’s calculus if the far more intense 38-day bombardment that opened the war did not. And Mr. Trump appears less than eager to return to full-scale war as Republicans facing election this fall agitate for an end to a conflict that is deeply unpopular with voters, according to polls. Even as he said last week that he thought the cease-fire was “over,” he said that talks would continue.
In the interview with Mr. Hewitt, Mr. Trump all but dismissed the importance of his own cease-fire agreement, suggesting that he never expected it to succeed even though the White House had called it “a historic breakthrough.” The cease-fire was a memorandum of understanding and “they don’t mean much,” he said.
He added that it “was sort of a test” that the Iranians failed. “These people are crazy,” Mr. Trump said. “We had a deal where we won everything and they basically break the deal. You know, they make deals — to them, deals are made to be broken. They are extremely unreliable people.”
Robert Jimison contributed reporting.
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