Less than two weeks after the United States and Iran signed a fourteen-point Memorandum of Understanding on 17 June — including what both sides called an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” — the ceasefire has come apart and been hastily reassembled. According to the BBC, strikes resumed last Thursday when an Iranian projectile struck a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz. The US retaliated over the weekend with strikes on multiple targets in Iran; Iran responded by hitting US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, though the US says none of the attacks caused casualties or damage. By Sunday, a US official told CBS News that the two sides had agreed to “stand down,” and that ships would be able to move through the Gulf “freely.” President Trump, posting on Truth Social, announced that Iran had requested a meeting in Doha. Iranian deputy foreign minister Kazem Gharibabadi denied that technical talks were planned; the White House subsequently confirmed Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were flying to Qatar. Both things can be true simultaneously in this administration.
The received wisdom
The mainstream diplomatic case for the MoU is straightforward and not without merit. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil; closing it in February, after the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran, sent energy prices sharply higher and prompted the IMF to warn of global recession risk. A framework that keeps ships moving, however imperfectly, is better than the alternative. The “stand down” after this weekend’s exchange of strikes — even if chaotic, even if contradicted by Tehran’s own spokespeople within hours — is a sign that both sides still prefer negotiation to open war. The Doha talks, if they happen, offer a path toward the more permanent deal the MoU promises.
There is also a reasonable argument that these flare-ups are predictable features of any ceasefire negotiation, not signs of fundamental bad faith. The Lebanon framework signed on Friday — where Hezbollah’s leader immediately rejected the agreement even as US-Israeli terms were being announced — illustrates the same dynamic: multiple actors with divergent interests means any complex ceasefire will fray at the edges before it stabilises.
A different read
The problem is that the MoU’s structural design makes this recurrent breakdown almost inevitable. Under its terms, Iran agreed to use its “best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days.” That formulation is remarkable for what it does not say. Iran did not commit to preventing attacks; it committed to making “best efforts.” The obligation is soft, the timeline is short, and the enforcement mechanism is, implicitly, further US military action. What the MoU created was not a ceasefire architecture but an agreement to negotiate a ceasefire — and it is being tested before the negotiations have produced anything durable.
The deeper problem is Iran’s internal politics. The Hormuz confrontation was never purely a state-on-state affair; Iranian-backed groups in the region — Hezbollah, Houthi remnants, Iraqi proxy militias — have their own logics and their own patrons within the Iranian system. A foreign minister can sign an MoU; the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is under no obligation to comply with it on the same timetable. This pattern is not new. Iran and the US have a long history of reaching understandings that are immediately undermined by actors whom the Iranian state formally disavows but operationally enables. The 2015 JCPOA constrained the nuclear programme while Iranian proxy activity in Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq accelerated. A Hormuz ceasefire faces the same disaggregation problem.
The Israel dimension compounds matters. The Lebanon framework signed Friday — intended to pave the way to lasting peace — was immediately followed by Israeli strikes on Hezbollah tunnels in southern Lebanon, with the US informed in advance. Tehran has stated that hostilities in Lebanon must stop for any wider deal to hold. That condition gives Iranian hardliners an indefinitely renewable veto over any ceasefire, because Israel will not stop responding to Hezbollah provocations and Hezbollah will not stop provoking. Each new flare-up in Lebanon becomes a pretext for the IRGC to argue that the MoU’s preconditions have not been met.
What a durable settlement would actually require is something neither side has publicly offered: a verifiable agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme combined with a regional security framework that addresses Tehran’s legitimate interest in not being encircled by hostile military bases. The MoU, at fourteen points, contains neither. It is a deconfliction agreement dressed in the language of peace. Deconfliction agreements are useful — they prevent accidents from escalating into wars — but they are not the same as resolved conflicts. The United States learned this lesson painfully in the Korean armistice of 1953, which created stability without resolution and has required a continuous military presence for seventy-three years. In the Gulf, where the US has no comparable desire for indefinite forward deployment, the MoU’s fragility is a more urgent problem.
What to watch
Whether the Doha meeting between Witkoff, Kushner and Iranian officials actually produces anything substantive depends on Tehran’s internal dynamics as much as American diplomacy. Watch whether Iranian foreign ministry statements and IRGC operational behaviour converge or diverge in the days following.
The Lebanon ceasefire framework is the immediate stress test. If Hezbollah continues operations and Israel continues to respond, Tehran will use this as grounds to revisit the MoU. The first three weeks of July — before the sixty-day “best efforts” window starts to close — are the critical period for establishing whether this deal has any structural life.
Oil price movements remain the barometer. Markets initially priced the MoU as durable; another spike would signal that traders have concluded otherwise.
— J