Trump called off the strike, and negotiations start Monday afternoon. Buried in the coverage is a sentence from Iran’s Foreign Ministry that deserves more attention than the strike that didn’t happen: the Strait of Hormuz, Esmaeil Baghaei said, “will in no way return to the status it was before February 28th.” Tehran is talking with Oman about a new route and, according to earlier reporting, about fees. Washington is offering to lift its naval blockade in trade. Two governments are sitting down to divide up a piece of sea. The Church has something specific to say about that, and it starts with a claim most of us learned as children and then forgot: the water belongs to everyone.
The News Story
President Donald Trump called off a planned U.S. military strike on Iran over the weekend and said negotiations aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz and resolving the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program would begin Monday afternoon, the latest turn in a war now in its sixth month.[1]
Trump announced the reversal late Saturday on Truth Social, writing that the United States was “locked and loaded” but that Iran and other Middle Eastern countries had asked him to hold off because “the parameters of a deal has been agreed to.” He said the framework would include “the immediate, complete, and total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat,” and that he had agreed to cancel the attack “subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL.”[3]
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday as he returned to Washington from Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump said the canceled operation would have been “the biggest attack since World War II” and that he scrapped it after appeals from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as from Iranian officials. He said Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom he spoke by phone Saturday, told him Gulf states “would much prefer a deal as opposed to an attack.” A person briefed on the call, speaking anonymously, said the crown prince warned that escalation could severely damage the global economy if Iran retaliated against U.S. Gulf allies.[2] Trump said negotiations would resume “tomorrow afternoon” but declined to identify the participants or venue and refused to set a deadline. “I’m not looking to kill people,” he said.[4]
The war began Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran. Iran has since largely closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas moved before the conflict, driving energy prices sharply higher and feeding broader inflation. Oil prices fell more than 4 percent in early Monday trading following Trump’s announcement.[5] An Associated Press poll released last week put approval of Trump’s handling of the economy at 32 percent.[6]
Iranian officials offered a narrower account. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said the strait “will in no way return to the status it was before February 28th” and that ongoing talks with Oman concern a new shipping route with “no link to the Strait of Hormuz being opened or closed.” Iran’s IRNA news agency, citing Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, reported the Oman negotiations were in their final stages. Araqchi spoke by phone with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir. Iran’s defense minister said on X that Tehran was “neither surprised nor passive.”[7]
A regional official involved in mediation said the proposal calls for reopening the strait and halting attacks across the region, including by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, in exchange for the United States lifting its naval blockade and permitting Iranian oil exports. No agreement has been reached.[8]
Trump said Israel had joined his commitment to implement the June ceasefire; Israel did not publicly comment. Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen said that with or without an agreement, Israel would strike if Iran revived its nuclear or ballistic missile programs. Tehran denies seeking a nuclear weapon.[9]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
The Water Belongs To Everyone
Start with the geography, because the moral question follows from it.
The Strait of Hormuz is about 21 miles across at its narrowest point. Iran sits on the north shore. Oman’s Musandam peninsula sits on the south. Between them runs a channel that carried roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas before February 28. Every tanker leaving Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia’s eastern fields and Iran itself goes through that gap or goes nowhere. The wheat that reaches an Egyptian bakery and the diesel that runs a Pakistani irrigation pump are priced, in part, by whether a ship can get through those 21 miles.
And on Sunday, two governments were negotiating over who gets to say yes.
Iran’s position, stated plainly by its own Foreign Ministry, is that the strait will never go back to what it was. Tehran is working out a “new route” with Oman, and Reuters reported last month that an earlier Omani proposal, which Iran rejected, involved collecting voluntary fees from ships using the passage. America’s position, according to the regional official briefing reporters on the mediation, is that it will end the naval blockade and let Iranian oil out if Iran reopens the water and stops the militia attacks. Both sides are treating that channel as a thing they hold. Both are prepared to hand it over or take it back depending on what they get.
The Church looks at that channel and sees something else entirely.
A Right That Comes Before Any Map
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church puts the principle first, before it gets to property, markets, or states. “God destined the earth and all it contains for all men and all peoples so that all created things would be shared fairly by all mankind under the guidance of justice tempered by charity.”[10] The Catechism says the same thing in the shortest possible form: “The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race.”[11]
Notice how wide that goes. Pope Leo XIV, in Magnifica Humanitas, spells out the list: “the earth’s goods, soil, water, air and natural resources, are given by God to the entire human family to sustain the lives of all, and every person has an inherent right to the use of such goods, both now and in the future.”[12] Water is on that list by name. A sea lane is water, and it is also the road by which the goods of the earth actually reach the people they were destined for. A grain shipment sitting in a hold outside Bandar Abbas is not feeding anybody.
The Compendium then says something that ought to stop a foreign ministry cold. The universal right to use the goods of the earth is a natural right, “inscribed in human nature and not merely a positive right connected with changing historical circumstances.” It has priority “with regard to any human intervention concerning goods, to any legal system concerning the same, to any economic or social system or method.” And then the sentence that matters most for this week: “All other rights, whatever they are, including property rights and the right of free trade must be subordinated to this norm; they must not hinder it, but must rather expedite its application.”[13]
So the Church does not begin with Iranian territorial waters or American freedom of navigation doctrine. She begins with the fact that God gave the earth to everybody, and she treats every claim of ownership, every transit regime, every blockade, as something that has to justify itself against that prior fact. Sovereignty over the north shore of a strait is real. It is not first.
Regulated, Yes. Owned, No.
Here is where a careless reading goes wrong, so let me be exact, because the Church is not preaching a free-for-all at sea.
The Compendium is blunt that the universal destination of goods does not mean everything is at everyone’s disposal at all times. “In order to ensure that this right is exercised in an equitable and orderly fashion, regulated interventions are necessary, interventions that are the result of national and international agreements, and a juridical order that adjudicates and specifies the exercise of this right.”[14] Rules are part of the plan. Traffic separation schemes, pilotage requirements, transit fees, safety inspections, all of that can be perfectly legitimate. Somebody has to run a strait.
The question is what kind of thing does the running.
The Compendium’s answer is a juridical order: agreements freely made, binding on the parties, adjudicated by something other than the parties’ own convenience. “International law becomes the guarantor of the international order,” it says, “of coexistence among political communities that seek individually to promote the common good of their citizens and strive collectively to guarantee that of all peoples, aware that the common good of a nation cannot be separated from the good of the entire human family.”[15] That is the standard. Measure Sunday’s proposal against it.
What is on the table Monday afternoon is not a juridical order. It is an exchange of pressures. Iran holds the water because it has mines, small boats and anti-ship missiles on the north shore. America holds Iranian oil exports because it has a fleet. Each side offers to stop hurting the world in exchange for the other side stopping. Whatever comes out of that room, and I hope something does, will hold exactly as long as the balance of force that produced it holds. We watched this exact thing collapse in July, when the June memorandum came apart after Iran struck three vessels that took an unapproved route.
Two Sovereignties, One Habit
I want to be even-handed about who is doing what here, because the temptation in American Catholic commentary is to grade one government on a curve.
Iran’s claim is the more obviously wrong of the two. A state that closes an international strait, threatens shipping and fires on commercial vessels has taken a good given to the whole human family and made it a hostage. The Compendium’s teaching on national sovereignty is careful and generous, calling it “an expression of the freedom that must govern relations between States” and even a guarantee of a people’s cultural identity. Then it draws the line: “National sovereignty is not, however, absolute.”[16] A shoreline gives Iran real rights. It does not give Iran the right to decide whether a Filipino crew eats this month.
The American blockade sits under the same rule. A naval cordon that stops a nation’s oil from reaching buyers is an intentional obstruction of the flow of created goods, aimed at a population, in order to move a government. The Compendium’s teaching on economic pressure directed at whole peoples is settled, and this war has already given us occasion to say so. Adding a second obstruction to the first does not restore the universal destination of goods. It doubles the damage and then offers to undo half of it as a concession.
Two governments, one habit: treat what God gave to everyone as a card you hold. The Compendium names the underlying disease when it warns against the “temptation to appeal to the law of force rather than to the force of law.”[17]
The Neighbors Who Asked Him To Stop
There is one genuinely hopeful thing in Sunday’s reporting, and it has nothing to do with either principal.
Look at who moved. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called Washington on Saturday and pressed for the strike to be dropped. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates pushed in the same direction. Oman has spent weeks trying to work out how the strait it shares with Iran can be run. Iran’s foreign minister spent Sunday on the phone with Riyadh and with Pakistan’s army chief. None of those governments fired anything. They talked to both sides, and for the moment they got a bombing called off.
That is the shape of what the Church has been asking for. The Compendium says the interdependence among nations “takes on a moral dimension and is the determining factor for relations in the modern world,” and it calls for international political action that pursues peace “through the adoption of coordinated measures.”[18] The Gulf states did exactly that this weekend, out of self-interest as much as anything, since a wrecked Iranian refinery lands as a missile on a Kuwaiti desalination plant soon enough. Self-interest is a real motive and the Church has never pretended otherwise. It is also, in this case, pointed at the right outcome.
What the Compendium wants next is the part that has not happened. International cooperation requires that “beyond the strict market mentality, there should be an awareness of the duty to solidarity, justice and universal charity,” because “there exists something which is due to man because he is man, by reason of his lofty dignity.”[19] A phone call that stops a strike for 48 hours is not that yet. Neighbors who share a waterway sitting as parties to a binding agreement about how it runs would be. Right now they are couriers between two capitals, valuable and unenforceable.
I would put it this way for the men flying to Monday’s talks. The people who kept this from becoming the largest bombardment since 1945 were the ones with the least to gain from either side winning. That is worth noticing before the room fills back up with the two governments who started it.
Who Actually Pays For A Closed Strait
Twenty-one miles of water, and the bill lands thousands of miles away.
The countries hit hardest by a closed Hormuz are not the ones with navies. They are the importers who buy fuel and grain at whatever the market says on the day the ship arrives: Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Kenya, Egypt, Bangladesh. The Compendium is direct about how much access to trade matters to exactly those countries, noting that nations which cut themselves off from the world market “have suffered stagnation and recession,” and that “the chief problem is that of gaining fair access to the international market.”[20] Then two of the world’s larger militaries spent five months making that access a variable in their own negotiation.
Oil fell 4 percent Monday morning on a Truth Social post. That number will be read on financial pages as good news, and it is. It also tells you how much of a poor family’s monthly food budget currently depends on the mood of two men and a Gulf crown prince’s phone call. A father in Karachi buying cooking oil this week has no representation whatsoever in the room where Monday’s talks happen, and his grocery bill is one of the things being decided there.
Leo XIV, writing about international politics, refuses to accept that arrangement as normal. “As the divide between nations widens,” he says, “a mentality of confrontation and aggression begins to take hold, and the difficult path toward a more united and fraternal world suffers new and painful setbacks.” His answer is not resignation. He asks for “more effective international institutions, capable of safeguarding the global common good without compromising the legitimate diversity of peoples and nations,” and he adds a sentence that applies to both parties in this war: “any attempt or plan to eliminate or subjugate a nation is gravely immoral and therefore unacceptable.”[21]
What Leo XIV Has Changed About How We Argue This
A word about the framework, because readers who learned their Catholic ethics of war a generation ago will reach for the wrong tool here.
The older tradition, Aquinas above all, worked through a checklist: legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, proportion, last resort. Leo XIV has judged that framework no longer adequate to how war is actually waged now, and he has said so. The Church’s current mind treats the classical just war categories as a set of questions that modern war has outrun rather than a live test a belligerent can pass. That development governs, and it changes the shape of this argument. The right question about the strait is not whether closing it or blockading it satisfies a proportionality calculation. The question is whether the arrangement being negotiated Monday puts a good belonging to the whole human family back under law, or leaves it under whoever is currently strongest.
The Compendium already pointed this direction before Leo XIV sharpened it. It asks for “some universal public authority acknowledged as such by all and endowed with effective power to safeguard, on the behalf of all, security, regard for justice, and respect for rights,” and then insists on the condition: “it is essential that such an authority arise from mutual agreement and that it not be imposed.”[22] Not imposed. That single qualifier disqualifies both the Iranian toll booth and the American cordon, whichever one you were more inclined to forgive.
What A Catholic Should Want Out Of Monday
So what do we actually pray for at 2 p.m. Washington time?
Not merely that ships move. Ships moved in May, at $110 a barrel, under a threat that could be renewed by a phone call. Paul VI gave the better formula, and Leo XIV repeats it: development, meaning the concrete conditions of a dignified life for everyone, “is in reality ‘the new name for peace.'”[23] Applied to 21 miles of water, that means an agreement in which the strait stops being an asset either government can spend. Terms published rather than briefed anonymously. A body that adjudicates disputes over transit, with Oman and the Gulf states who share that water at the table as parties instead of messengers. Fees, if there are fees, set by agreement and not by whoever has the mines.
That is a tall order for a Monday afternoon, and I doubt we get it. Pope Leo prayed publicly for the victims of war again on Sunday, which is a hint about how far off the real thing still is.
But it is worth knowing what we are asking for, because the alternative on offer is a quiet strait that stays quiet at somebody’s pleasure. The water belongs to everyone. Any deal that forgets that will need renegotiating the next time one of these governments decides it is losing.
Footnotes
- Steve Holland, Menna AlaaElDin and Yasmine Ghania, “Trump Says Iran Talks to Take Place on Monday, Sets No Deadline for Deal,” Reuters, August 2, 2026, https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/aug/02/trump-holds-off-iran-strikes-on-pledge-a-hormuz-de/.
- Aamer Madhani and Samy Magdy, “After Canceling Iran Strikes, Trump Says Negotiations Will Resume Monday Afternoon While Tehran Continues Hormuz Talks with Oman,” Associated Press, August 2, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/08/02/iran-war-trump-negotiations-resume-monday-tehran-hormuz-talks-oman/.
- Anders Hagstrom, “Trump Cancels Joint Strikes on Iran After Reaching ‘Rough Framework’ of a Peace Deal,” Fox News, August 2, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/trump-iran-war-israel-hormuz-august-2.
- “Iran Live Updates: Trump Says New Iran Deal Is ‘Imminent,’ Negotiations Resume Monday,” ABC News, August 2, 2026, https://abcnews.com/International/live-updates/iran-live-updates-tehran-progress-made-strait-hormuz/?id=135110405.
- “Trump Holds Off Iran Strikes on Pledge a Hormuz Deal Is Close,” Bloomberg, August 2, 2026, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-02/trump-holds-off-iran-strikes-on-pledge-a-hormuz-deal-is-close.
- Amelia Thomson-Deveaux, Linley Sanders and Mike Catalini, “Trump’s Approval Rating on the Economy Sinks to Just 32%,” Associated Press, August 2, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/08/02/trump-approval-rating-economy-32-percent-republicans-support-inflation-iran-war/.
- “Trump Says Iran Talks to Resume Monday After Calling Off Planned Strikes,” CNBC, August 3, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/03/trump-iran-us-negotiations-peace-proposals-.html.
- “Negotiations with Iran Set for Monday as Trump Avoids Further Killing,” The Hill, August 2, 2026, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6004829-trump-iran-deal-negotiations/.
- “Trump: ‘Deal Is Imminent’ as Iran Talks Restart Monday on Hormuz, Denuclearization,” Breitbart, August 2, 2026, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/08/02/trump-deal-imminent-iran-talks-restart-monday-hormuz-denuclearization/.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 171, https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=7214.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2402, https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/section_two/chapter_two/article_7/i_the_universal_destination_and_the_private_ownership_of_goods.html.
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026), no. 65, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 172.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 173.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 434, https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7219.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 435.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 437.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 442.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 448.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 447.
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 64.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 441.
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 35, quoting Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio (1967).
Books Cited
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
- Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003
Leave a Reply