Speaking to a room of law enforcement officers in Garden City, New York on Friday, President Trump said that once the war with Iran is finished he will be “declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” Then he said the part that matters: “Essentially, that’s what it is. We have the blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to.”

That second sentence tells you what the first one is. This is not a legal claim being prepared somewhere in the State Department. It is a description of the blockade with a word attached to it that the blockade does not earn.

The Strait of Hormuz is a strait used for international navigation overlapping with the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, such straits are subject to the right of transit passage — a legal regime that grants all ships and aircraft the right to continuous and expeditious transit, and that limits the ability of coastal states to interfere with that transit. Iran has not ratified UNCLOS. It does not accept the transit passage framework. This legal disagreement is not merely academic. It is the normative foundation on which Iran’s claimed right to close or restrict the strait rests, and the normative foundation that every other party invokes to deny Iran that right.