Less than a month after the signing of a cease-fire between the US and Iran, conflict has returned to the Middle East.
The peace deal that Donald Trump signed at the Palace of Versailles in France on June 18 – which he hailed as Iran’s. “unconditional surrender” – is now, to the American president own words“finished”.
The recently argued that the memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Washington and Tehran was best understood not as a peace agreement, but as a “postponed crisis” – a ceasefire with a built-in detonator. That detonator is now off.
Trump’s statement that further talks with Tehran are “waste of time”which he did on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on July 8, follows an escalating spiral that will feel all too familiar to anyone following this conflict.
Iran attacked three merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday (July 7). The US responded with what an unnamed US official described as “punishment” strikes at more than 80 Iranian targets and reinstated sanctions on Iranian oil sales — removing Tehran’s central benefit from the deal.
Iran, on the other hand, launched revenge attacks on US military installations in Bahrain and Kuwait. Oil prices have risen, reviving the very economic pressure — rising prices at the American gas pump — that drew Trump to the negotiating table in June.
None of this should come as a surprise. The agreement signed in Versailles did not resolve the contradictions that caused the war. It institutionalized and unwittingly created the very conditions in which escalation becomes more likely.
The structural flaw in the ceasefire agreement was apparent from the start. The Memorandum of Understanding relied on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the lifting of sanctions on Iranian oil – almost the only lifeline supporting the Iranian economy. But nothing in the agreement resolved the Lebanon issue.
Iran had made it clear that one of its core objectives was to prevent further Israeli attacks against Hezbollah – an attempt to save its proxy network in the region. Israel, for its part, cannot forever suspend its right to self-defense as the price of a US diplomatic deal. Reports suggest that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “smoky” on the cooperation agreement agreement, to which Israel was not a party when it was drafted and signed.
This has produced the loop now in full screen: continued Israeli military action in Lebanon, Iran flexes its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and US attacks on Iranian assets to save face – even as Washington pressures Israel to back down. Each repetition intensifies the conviction in Tehran, Jerusalem and Washington that containment is no longer a viable course of action.
Leaders abandon restraint not simply when threats mount, but when restraint no longer feels like the way to act. Content only survives when it seems to work, leads to a better future, and feels like a choice rather than something imposed. When these conditions fail, restraint begins to look like paralysis, and escalation becomes the only way to regain control.
For Trump, all three of these conditions have collapsed. Iran is attacking commercial shipping despite the deal. Oil prices are rising as the US midterm elections approach. And every Iranian strike shows that Tehran, not Washington, is setting the pace and direction of the ceasefire. This dynamic is fundamentally unsustainable for the US.
For Netanyahu, this collapse is not a failure, but a confirmation of his lack of faith in the ceasefire agreement. Israel never accepted the premise of the Memorandum of Understanding. Its security establishment has stored throughout that the war with Iran was interrupted, not ended, and that any framework that gave impunity to Iranian-backed forces in Lebanon was unsustainable.
Shortly after signing the deal in June, Netanyahu said that “Israel’s war is not over” and his army “will remain in these security zones as long as necessary to defend our country.”
What comes next
Two scenarios are now presented, and in both, the Strait of Hormuz decides the outcome. In the first, the US continues to bomb Iranian military assets while trying to keep the strait open by force. This is a difficult task.
Iran does not need to defeat the US Navy to close the waterway; it just has to make the transit unsafe enough that insurers refuse to cover the ships. Continued airstrikes may degrade that capacity, but they cannot eliminate it.
This raises the question of whether ground forces would eventually be required, although this development would probably be challenged by Congress.
In the second, Trump limits the attacks and uses them as leverage to renegotiate the ceasefire. But this path has its own problem. Without the ability to guarantee free strait navigation, it’s hard to see how Trump gets a better deal than the one he just abandoned — from a belligerent and emboldened Iran that has absorbed heavy penalties and survived.
Either way, Trump’s margins are narrowing. Until Iran loses its leverage over the strait, the cycle we are currently seeing makes a protracted conflagration more likely.
Ben Soodavar is a lecturer, Department of War Studies, King’s College London
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
