The fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran — a fourteen-point Memorandum of Understanding signed on June 17 — is collapsing in real time. Over the weekend of June 28–29, both sides exchanged strikes and accused each other of being the first to violate the agreement. On Saturday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked a Panama-flagged tanker, MT Kiku, in the Strait of Hormuz; the US responded by striking ten Iranian military targets. Iran then launched ballistic missiles and drones at American bases in Kuwait and Bahrain. President Trump posted on Truth Social that if he were forced to “militarily complete the job,” the Islamic Republic of Iran “will no longer exist.” Neither side has blinked. The strait that carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil remains a theatre of active hostilities. Kuwait activated air defences; Bahrain reported a residential building damaged near its international airport.
The received wisdom
The dominant reading of this crisis is straightforward, and it is not without merit. Diplomats and progressive commentators argue that the MOU was a genuine attempt at de-escalation by both sides — an imperfect but real step away from a war that has already cost thousands of lives and sent oil prices spiralling. The deal’s ambiguity, on this reading, was a feature rather than a bug: deliberate vagueness bought both Tehran and Washington enough political cover to move toward an eventual settlement without humiliating their domestic constituencies. Iran’s hardliners needed to be able to claim they had not surrendered Hormuz; the administration needed to claim it had secured free passage. The breakdown, the mainstream view holds, is the result of spoilers — the IRGC, Netanyahu’s continued pressure on Lebanon — rather than any fundamental flaw in the diplomatic framework. Give it time, keep talking, and a fuller agreement is still achievable.
This view deserves respect. It reflects the genuine complexity of the situation, and the negotiators involved — Qatar, Pakistan as mediators, Swiss-based talks — are serious actors. The alternative to a deal is clearly worse.
A different read
The problem is that the MOU was too broadly worded from the start — and not accidentally so. As Patrick Wintour’s analysis in The Guardian explains, the critical clause committed Iran to making “arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” with no charge for sixty days. “Arrangements” and “best efforts” were left entirely undefined. The word “arrangements” implicitly treated Iran as the sovereign authority over the strait, without actually establishing what that authority meant in practice. When the IRGC Navy declared on Thursday that ships could only use the northern route through Iranian-controlled waters — and then struck the Ever Lovely, a Singapore-flagged container ship that tried the southern Omani-coast route — the IMO suspended its evacuation plan within hours. The ambiguity had not bought trust; it had created exploitable gaps.
There is a deeper pattern here worth naming. The architects of the MOU were in an impossible position, and they knew it. Iran’s chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf stated publicly that “the administration of the Strait of Hormuz will never go back to the way it was before the war.” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called from Baghdad for “a new regional security framework… without the presence or interference of any country from outside the region.” These are not the words of a government preparing to concede on its core demand. They are the words of a government that believes it has fought the United States and survived, and that survival now entitles it to structural changes in the regional order.
American-Iranian ceasefire diplomacy has a consistent recent history of collapsing under the weight of exactly this kind of definitional gap. The 2015 JCPOA fell apart not because its technical constraints were unworkable but because both sides read it as confirming incompatible long-term trajectories. Obama-era negotiators celebrated it as the beginning of Iranian re-integration into the international system; Iranian hardliners celebrated it as a temporary concession that bought time. The current MOU repeats this mistake at the operational level: the document allows Iran to claim it controls Hormuz and allows the US to claim it has secured free passage, when in fact these claims are mutually exclusive.
The Lebanon complication compounds the problem. A separate Washington ceasefire deal signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio — which excluded Iran and Hezbollah and kept Israeli forces in southern Lebanon until full Hezbollah disarmament — is directly incompatible with Iran’s stated precondition for any deal with the US. Tehran has insisted its agreement is conditional on a Lebanon ceasefire that gives it a role. Washington signed a Lebanon deal that deliberately cuts Iran out. These two documents are pulling against each other, and the soldiers and sailors caught in between are paying the price.
There is also a domestic Iranian political dimension that Western commentary tends to underweight. Supporters of the MOU inside Tehran are, as The Guardian notes, “on the back foot.” Statements are proliferating even among non-hardliners that Iran should never have agreed to reopen Hormuz. The IRGC, which has accumulated enormous institutional power during the war, has every incentive to torpedo a deal that constrains its leverage. An Iranian government that wanted to honour the MOU may not have the institutional capacity to enforce it over IRGC objections.
The Trump administration’s rhetorical escalation — threatening to erase Iran as a state — may feel satisfying to an American public exhausted by the war, but it makes a negotiated exit harder, not easier. It hands the IRGC exactly the external threat narrative it needs to silence domestic moderates.
What to watch
The next signals to track: whether Qatar and Pakistan can broker an emergency deconfliction meeting within the week, or whether the breakdown is allowed to harden. Watch oil prices — if they spike back toward war-time levels, both sides face renewed economic pressure to re-engage. The IMO’s posture on shipping evacuations will tell you something about whether the maritime dimension is recoverable. Most importantly, watch whether the Iranian negotiating team formally walks out of the Switzerland-format talks; that is the clearest tripwire between “dangerous standoff” and “resumed full-scale conflict.”
— J