President Donald Trump said Friday that the United States and Iran had agreed — once again — to continue “talks,” but he also reiterated in a social media post that the U.S. had told Tehran “in no uncertain terms, that the Cease Fire is OVER!”
Trump’s announcement followed days of escalatory strikes that shattered the fragile truce reached between Washington and Tehran last month.
A memorandum of understanding signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian set forth an initial framework to end the war and kicked off negotiations aimed at reaching a more durable peace accord within 60 days.
That framework collapsed this week, with Trump decrying Iranian strikes on ships in the Strait of Hormuz and calling the country leader’s “scum.”
Now, analysts say, the region is caught somewhere between war and peace, with the two sides unable to agree on how to interpret the loosely written MOU. The key point of contention regards control of the strait, a narrow waterway vital to global commerce.
“It is so vague that everyone interpreted it differently,” Yoel Guzansky, a senior researcher and head of the Gulf Research Field at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said of the MOU. “Now it is a negotiation under fire, with both sides trying to pressure the other.”
Trump, Guzansky said “talks loudly and has a big stick, but he doesn’t have an appetite for a long regional war.”
Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, meanwhile needs to “show internally that he is strong, so he is doubling down and not caving to compromises.”
The Strait of Hormuz appears not to have been part of calculations by the Trump White House and its Israeli allies before the war, Guzansky said, but it has become Iran’s best leverage as its blocking of cargo traffic sent oil prices soaring and disrupted global supply chains.
“We started the war with Trump and Netanyahu talking about lofty goals of regime change and nuclear disarmament,” he said. “No one is talking about those now. … Now it is just about Hormuz.”
This week’s strikes kicked off after Iran attacked two ships transiting the strait, which infuriated Trump, who then ordered two days of bombing in Iran that hit key port cities and a railway in the north. Iran retaliated with strikes on U.S. targets in the Persian Gulf and Jordan.
Nations in the Gulf region are now deeply on edge, knowing they are part of the surviving hard-line Iranian regime’s strategy for pressuring Trump, who has been eager to end the unpopular war, and for demonstrating the regime’s strength to the Iranian population.
Since Feb. 28, when the U.S. and Israeli strikes began with the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s military has been severely degraded but its leadership has grown more confident, analysts say.
Andrew Leber, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based policy institute, said that the MOU was rushed so that Trump could score political points at home.
“Normally, you would have negotiated until you reached language that both sides agreed on,” Leber said. “But Trump wanted to be able to say that the war was over and turn to celebrating America’s 250th birthday.”
The position of Oman — a onetime intermediary that has drawn Trump’s ire for being too close to Iran — shows the complexity of the situation, Leber said.
Oman has simultaneously said it is on board with Iran’s plan to charge fees for boats to transit the strait and also allowed U.S. Navy ships to escort cargo vessels transiting close to Oman’s shores, avoiding the Iranian authorities and infuriating the Iranians.
On Hormuz, Leber said, Iran appears to be using a strategy similar to its approach to negotiations over its nuclear program, when it insisted that it had the right to nuclear enrichment, even if it did not act on that right.
The difference is that Iran legally did have that right to enrichment under international law, while the strait is an international waterway to which all countries should have access.
William F. Wechsler, the senior director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, said that by continuing to attack ships in the strait, Iran appears to be falling back on the policy the regime has used for generations, “moving up the escalation ladder in order to establish a new normal of de facto accepted behavior that is just below the threshold of war.”
Previously, Wechsler noted, Iran succeeded in creating a status quo that allowed it to arm regional proxy groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen without substantial repercussions.
Now, he said, Tehran has succeeded in securing some degree of control of the strait and is trying to maximize that leverage.
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