Lula calls Trump's Strait of Hormuz levy plan 'piracy' as global shipping braces for a 20% surcharge

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva walked to the microphones on 13 July 2026 and did something the chancelleries of the Gulf have so far refused to do. He called a US plan to charge ships for moving through the Strait of Hormuz what it sounded like to him: piracy. "Back in the day, that used to be called piracy," Lula said, in remarks captured on video and distributed by Middle East Eye at 02:25 UTC on 14 July 2026.

The provocation was specific. US President Donald Trump has said he wants Washington reimbursed by countries that benefit from the American naval presence in the strait, the narrow sealane between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula through which a large share of the world's seaborne oil flows. Reuters reported the comments at 02:40 UTC on 14 July, characterising the demand as a 20% transit fee tied to the cost of protecting the waterway. By 05:48 UTC, the Brazilian president's rebuke had been syndicated by Sprinter Press under the same headline frame: "Lula da Silva calls Trump's plans to impose a 20% tariff on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz 'piracy.'"

Lula's framing matters less for the insult than for the politics it exposes. No Latin American navy patrols the Hormuz corridor. Brazilian tankers, however, do transit it, hauling crude from West Africa, the Gulf and beyond into Brazilian refineries and re-export markets. A 20% surcharge layered on top of war-risk premia, P&I insurance and the daily tanker rate already priced into a Cape-to-Rotterdam voyage will not be absorbed by shipowners. It will be passed through, into Brazilian gasoline, into Brazilian industrial input costs, and into the trade balance that Lula's government has spent three years trying to repair.

The demand, and what it actually means

The Trump administration's logic, as paraphrased in the Reuters wire, is reimbursement: countries whose economies rely on Hormuz transit ought to pay for the US Navy's continued role as the waterway's de facto guarantor. The arithmetic was not disclosed in the Reuters item, but the proposed instrument is clear, a 20% fee on ships passing through the strait. The policy does not yet exist as a written rule, and the sources do not specify whether the levy would be collected by the US Treasury, by a flag-state certification regime, or by a coalition carrier like the Combined Maritime Forces headquartered in Bahrain. What is on the public record is the political claim: protection is a service, and the customer should pay.

That formulation runs into a problem of jurisdiction the moment it leaves the briefing room. The Strait of Hormuz is shared waters, governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea's transit passage regime, not by US statute. Iran has historically treated any unilateral levy on Hormuz traffic as a casus belli and responded in 2019 by seizing commercial tankers after the Trump administration tightened secondary sanctions. If the White House formalises the fee, Tehran will not need to wait long for a precedent to point to, including its own.

Why a Brazilian president, and why now

Lula's intervention is the first senior Latin American head-of-state response captured on camera. It is also a calculated one. Brazil assumed the rotating presidency of BRICS in 2025 and has used the chair to position itself as the diplomatic bridge between the Global South and the major-power blocs on questions of payment architecture, sanctions enforcement and maritime security. Calling the US proposal piracy rather than, say, an extraterritorial measure or a protection racket, lands the framing inside the vocabulary that BRICS foreign ministers have used for years when discussing unilateral US financial reach. It is the kind of language that travels.

The shipping market is already pricing the dispute. Tanker operators rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope during the 2019 episode, adding roughly two weeks of voyage time per round trip. Insurance markets responded with war-risk surcharges that moved from low single digits to roughly 7% of hull value within a quarter. A 20% transit levy layered on top of that regime would be larger than any single state-imposed surcharge in the modern oil-tanker market. The cost will land on importers, not on the US Navy.

The counter-narrative, taken seriously

The US case for the fee is not devoid of merit. The Fifth Fleet and its coalition partners have, since 2004, escorted commercial traffic through Hormuz in response to Iranian harassment, recovered drifted mines and interdicted weapons shipments bound for Houthi forces in Yemen. Iranian fast-boat seizures of commercial tankers in 2024 and 2025 put crews at risk and raised insurance premia for everyone, including Brazilian-flag carriers. From Washington's vantage point, the proposed reimbursement is a cost-share arrangement in which the largest beneficiaries, China, India, Japan and South Korea, currently pay nothing for a service they consume every day.

But the remedy the White House has chosen is structurally flawed. A fee levied on the ship rather than on the cargo cannot, in practice, be collected from Chinese or Indian-flag vessels without risking a maritime incident. It will be collected from the operators most exposed to US port state control, meaning US, EU and Brazilian-flag tonnage, which is the opposite of burden-sharing. The Reuters wire does not specify which vessels would be subject to the fee, and the Brazilian president's critique lands hardest precisely on that ambiguity.

What is not yet on the record

Three things remain unresolved in the public reporting. The legal mechanism for the levy has not been published. The list of vessels and flag states subject to it has not been disclosed. And the diplomatic reaction from the three countries whose naval forces also operate in the Gulf, the United Kingdom, France and India, has not yet been logged in the wire items available to this publication. Each of those gaps is consequential: the first determines whether the fee is collectable; the second determines who actually pays; the third determines whether the proposal survives contact with the rest of the P5+1 architecture.

The next forty-eight hours are the window in which the proposal either hardens into a regulatory text or softens into a negotiating posture. Brazil's response has moved the Overton window for how leaders of the Global South are willing to name it. The shipping market will watch for the first US Maritime Advisory that translates the rhetoric into a transit corridor requirement. And Tehran will watch for the first Iranian-flag transit that the US attempts to bill. Each of those events is a date worth marking on the calendar.

Lula's piracy framing puts a Latin American voice at the centre of a dispute the wires have largely told through Gulf and Washington lenses. The structural story is bigger than the insult: who pays for the security of the world's most consequential oil chokepoint, and whether a 20% fee is a cost-share or a toll.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1959850367899791589
• http://reut.rs/4fcJoRn
• https://x.com/sprinterpress/status/1959863175629840481