UK to host international summit on reopening Hormuz, Starmer says

Britain will this week hold a meeting of about 35 countries to discuss how to reopen the strategic Strait of Hormuz that has been crippled by the Middle East war, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announces.

UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper will host the discussions, Starmer tells reporters during a Downing Street press conference, without specifying the day of the talks.

The meeting will “assess all viable diplomatic and political measures that we can take to restore freedom of navigation, guarantee the safety of trapped ships and seafarers and resume the movement of vital commodities,” Starmer says.

“Following that meeting, we will also convene our military planners to look at how we can marshal our capabilities and make the strait accessible and safe after the fighting has stopped,” he adds.

The discussions will include countries that recently signed a statement saying they were ready “to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz,” Starmer says. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands are among those to have signed it.

“I do have to level with people on this. This (reopening) will not be easy,” says Starmer.

Meanwhile, Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also announces her country has agreed to coordinate closely with France in pushing for an end to the Iran war and the reopening of Hormuz.

“Because the international situation is so challenging, I believe there is great significance in the leaders of Japan and France deepening their personal ties and making our cooperation even stronger,” Takaichi says after talks with French President Emmanuel Macron in Tokyo on security ties and industrial cooperation.

Macron also says he shares Takaichi’s position on the need to restore freedom of navigation in the strait.

Japan, which normally gets around ​90% of its ⁠oil from the Middle East, has begun drawing on its oil reserves to cushion the economic blow from the closure of the strait. Tokyo has said it could consider dispatching minesweepers, though the scope of any role would be constrained by its pacifist constitution.

Iran has virtually closed the vital strait since the US-Israeli strikes that started the war on February 28, causing global oil and gas prices to soar. A fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes through the strait in peacetime.