The Strait of Hormuz is reopening, and the oil market has already moved on. Brent settled below $79 a barrel this week, its lowest level since early March and a fourth consecutive session of losses — the longest losing streak of the year. The premium that carried Brent above $114 in March, the fear that priced in a closed chokepoint handling a fifth of the world’s crude, has bled out in the span of a few sessions. The memorandum of understanding signed by Washington and Tehran reopens the waterway without Iranian tolls for at least sixty days and clears Iran to sell oil immediately. Traders are pricing the supply. They are not pricing the wait.

The past 48 hours have produced movement on paper and paralysis in practice. Iran submitted a new proposal. The US launched a coalition recruitment drive. Neither development has changed the fundamental condition of the strait: effectively closed, economically catastrophic, diplomatically gridlocked.

Iran’s sequencing gambit. Tehran sent Washington a formal proposal via Pakistani mediators: reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the US naval blockade first, defer nuclear negotiations to a later stage. The logic is transparent — Iranian leadership is internally divided on what nuclear concessions are even permissible, and stripping that issue from the table removes the core source of deadlock. Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi raised the framework during meetings in Islamabad over the weekend with Pakistani, Egyptian, Turkish, and Qatari intermediaries. The White House confirmed Trump discussed the proposal with his national security team Monday, but offered no indication of acceptance. Secretary of State Rubio was blunter: Iran’s version of “open” means permission-based transit with tolls, not freedom of navigation. “Those are international waterways. They cannot normalize, nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize, a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it,” Rubio said.

The price of oil is not a single number. It is a cluster of interconnected prices — benchmark crudes, differentials, futures curves, physical cargo assessments — that reflect supply and demand conditions, transportation costs, refinery preferences, and risk. The Hormuz risk premium is one component of this price structure, and tracking how it enters and exits the price complex reveals something important about how markets price geopolitical threats that are real but uncertain.