In the days before US president Donald Trump signed his preliminary deal with Iran after a dinner at Versailles – where the first World War officially ended – he and his aides described their strategy: The Strait of Hormuz would open to traffic and the United States would open the spigot so that Iran could sell billions of dollars of oil.
The theory, Trump said, is that after years of sanctions, Iran would quickly get addicted to a torrent of revenue, and access to dollars in western banks. It was a “really good deal for Iran,” the president said in a call to a New York Times reporter three days before he signed the June 17th memorandum of understanding.
“They are actually proud of it,” he said of the Iranian negotiators. “I think they were tired of getting hit.”
Apparently not. Less than a month into the accord, strikes on three ships passing through the strait, in a channel beyond Iran’s control, led Trump to revoke the waiver that allowed Iran to sell oil. The United States has bombed more than 170 Iranian military targets over two nights.
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Trump on Friday said the US had agreed to talks with Iran after Tehran asked to continue. But he stressed that the ceasefire between the two nations was over, leaving open the possibility for more strikes.
If Trump and his aides now have a Plan C – after bombing and a preliminary accord failed – they have not described it. Instead, it appears that they are returning to the oil sanctions and bombing runs that Trump describes as devastating, but that so far have only led to the current tangle.
“So, the deal is very simple,” US vice president JD Vance said on Wednesday. “If they shoot at ships, we’re going to knock the hell out of them,” added Vance, who opposed the initial February 28th attack but has since been tasked with defending the war and negotiating a way out of it.
In other words, carrots are out. Sticks are back. But the administration has yet to answer why it believes this combination of economic warfare and bombing will yield a different result this time.
“We are at something of a strategic dead-end,” said Richard N Haass, a long-time diplomat who served at the US state department and the National Security Council under several administrations, including George W Bush’s during the early days of the Iraq war.
“The dilemma here is that the more we attack, the more the Iranians attack the Gulf oil and energy infrastructure,” he said. “And the administration still has not figured out how to defend those sites.”
Trump, he said, “first hoped he could bomb them into regime change, then he hoped he could bomb them into capitulation – neither worked.”
Nor, it seems, did the decision to let Iran reap the benefits of oil sales, which for Trump was a complete reversal: In his first term, and until a month or so ago, he seemed far more interested in sticks. The granting of oil sales was rooted in the belief – one that permeated the negotiations over the Gaza Strip last year – that even revolutionaries have visions of modern, smooth-running economies that will shower their people with profits.
Trump is also caught in the sharp divisions in Iran. Those were vividly displayed this week, during the funeral services for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who was killed in the opening hours of the attack on Tehran.
A key negotiator, foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, had a rock thrown at him at one of the funeral processions and was accused of appeasement. Attackers cursed him and called for his death. President Masoud Pezeshkian did not fare much better and had to be rescued from an angry crowd by his security detail.
But when Trump talks publicly about Iran, he rarely speaks of the divisions that cut through the society. Instead, he talks as if it is organised as a top-down government, led by Mojtaba Khamenei, the slain supreme leader’s son and one of the group of emerging leaders that just a few weeks ago Trump was calling more “reasonable” than their predecessors. (On Wednesday, in Ankara, Turkey, for the Nato summit, he called them “scum.”)
On Thursday, just back from the summit, Trump and his aides said little in public about their next steps. A US official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration was still committed to finding a peaceful resolution and expected that what the administration called “technical talks” would continue.
But even that phrase is full of contradictions, because the divisions facing Iran and the US are not “technical” – they are political, and lower-level negotiators will not be empowered to solve them.
One example concerns the future of the nuclear programme. The June ceasefire agreement is vague on all the significant issues, including whether Iran would retain control of its stockpile of nuclear fuel. Under a 2015 accord that former US president Barack Obama signed but Trump later withdrew from, Iran turned over 97 per cent of its then-existing stockpile. Trump is highly sensitive to any suggestion that he might get less than Obama did.
But the first political struggle may be over the question of who controls the strait, where the administration is paying the price for a vaguely worded paragraph in the memorandum of understanding that Trump signed at Versailles. It is a prime example of what happens when Iranian and US officials fudge the differences in a negotiated document, then interpret it very differently.
Paragraph 5 of the agreement reads: “Upon the signing of this M.O.U., [memorandum of understanding] the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, with no charge for 60 days only, from the Gulf to the Sea of Oman, and vice versa.”
Trump and his aides thought that this was the key to unlocking ship traffic and that it put the onus on the Iranians. The Iranians took it as an opening to control the key oil-shipping passage, insisting that ships travel in a channel closest to their shore. Ultimately, Iran has indicated it plans to charge for passage through the strait.
When the US navy began not so secretly escorting ships through a different channel, close to Oman, Iran’s reaction was to fire on some of the ships. Now, according to Lloyd’s of London, there is very little movement through the strait. That is what has frustrated Trump, and led to his declaration that the accord is “over”.
Trump’s aides insist that they are not in violation of the accord; the memorandum of understanding, they say, is performance-based, and Iran’s actions failed that test.
All of which takes Trump back to where he was in April, when he discovered that military force could not solve the problem – and that many in Iran see any diplomatic solution as nothing more than a holding pattern until the next Israeli-American attack. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
