The New York Times reported it plainly: Oman has formally handed the US and its Western allies a proposal to start charging service fees on ships transiting the strait.
Not a rumor, not a trial balloon, a written plan already on the table.
Larry Johnson's read is that this quietly settles the argument he and I have chewed on for days.
While everyone waited to see who blinks, Muscat and Tehran went ahead and decided.
Which is why he had little patience for Vance's insistence that there will be no tolled Hormuz and that oil is flowing at pre-war levels.
Larry keeps his eyes on the tanker trackers, and he says the picture doesn't match the pitch: a fraction of the old volume, every barrel of it heading to Asia, not one tanker pointed at Europe or the US.
The part that stayed with me was his answer on the "reopen it by force" plan some guests float, warships escorting convoys, jets swatting launchers as they fire.
He called it fantasy, because the missiles come from under granite and the ballistic and hypersonic ones have no reliable answer.
His question hangs there: if it were that simple, why didn't they do it in the first 45 days?
@NewSonof
