President Donald Trump shocked Gulf allies and many of his own aides with his plan to impose a toll on the Strait of Hormuz, touching off an international scramble to convince him to reverse course on his demand, several sources familiar with the matter told CNN. The abrupt announcement on Monday came despite months of warnings from Trump’s own advisers not to pursue the idea, for fear it would undermine the US’ own war aims — as well as validate Iran’s purported plans to charge fees in the strait, which the administration repeatedly characterized as illegal. But as he surveyed the intensifying struggle over the strait that had drawn the US back into full-fledged war, a frustrated Trump pressed ahead anyway. “The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’” he wrote on Truth Social Monday morning, vowing to charge a 20% toll on all cargo shipped through the strait. The surprise directive sparked a 24-hour sprint within the administration and across the Middle East to decode the specifics of a proposal that Trump had seemingly come up with on the spot. And while he reversed his plans on Tuesday, the episode further underscored the freewheeling, transactional nature of Trump’s approach to foreign policy, even in the midst of a prolonged war that he has no clear idea how to bring to an end. US President Donald Trump during an executive order signing in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday, July 13, 2026. Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg/Getty Images Inside the White House on Monday, aides rushed to flesh out the logistics for creating such an unprecedented tolling system, including determining who would pay the fees and how they would be collected. Many officials and outside analysts initially assumed shippers would foot the bill, but the effort was further complicated by another Trump declaration later on Monday that US allies in the Gulf would be paying instead. Those same Gulf allies’ leaders, meanwhile, were working frantically to get Trump on the phone in time to talk him out of the idea altogether. By Tuesday morning, the flurry of appeals from nations — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar — had succeeded. Instead of the US collecting tolls, Trump announced that the countries had pledged to pour new, undefined sums into US investments. The Gulf nations have already committed to invest trillions of dollars into the US, though it remains unclear how much of that they will actually spend over the next several years.
