^{The Ceasefire Has Now Collapsed}

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the United States and Iran suspended their war and provided a framework for further negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme, ballistic missiles and other disputed topics.

Less than a month after it was signed, it has failed, and “a document intended to halt a war has instead become reason for resuming it.”

This is the highly respected opinion of Ali Vaez, who directs the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group (The New York Times/NYT, July 16).

This shows that the MoU was badly negotiated, the mediation was unsatisfactory, and the document itself was poorly formulated.

The immediate dispute concerns who controls the Strait of Hormuz, but more is at stake.

The collapse of even this minimal understanding could remove the last barrier between episodic confrontation and a forever war, writes Vaez in his opinion piece in the NYT.

The memorandum was not a peace agreement by any stretch of the imagination.

It did not reconcile the two antagonists, resolve their dispute over limits to Iran’s nuclear programme or establish a durable regional order.

The MoU merely placed a guardrail for a relationship that had fallen into open warfare.

If that guardrail collapses, each round of fighting will become the foundation for the next.

However, renewed war will not alter the reality that gave rise to the MoU in the first place.

The United States can inflict devastating destruction on Iran, but it cannot eliminate Tehran’s ability to disrupt shipping through the Strait.

Iran can impose severe economic costs for the world at large by choking the international waterway, but it cannot compel Washington to accept its narrow, nationalistic terms.

After more missiles are fired, ships attacked, infrastructure destroyed and even more civilians killed, the aggressive two parties will return to the same negotiating table  — but only angrier and less capable of compromise, writes Vaez.

The ostensible cause of the breakdown is the memorandum’s fifth paragraph.

It requires Iran to “make arrangements using its best efforts” to ensure safe commercial passage, without specifying whether Tehran was committed to reopening the waterway across the entire Strait, including the southern section near Oman, or only to its northern waters.

That hedging/prevarication/equivocation was good enough to get both sides to sign off on the text, but also fuzzy/nebulous enough for each side to give its preferred interpretation.

For Washington, the provision reopened the Strait of Hormuz to maritime traffic.

For Tehran, it preserved for itself a role in coordinating the passage for every vessel, regardless of the corridor – northern, central or southern – it used.

But imprecise drafting also kept the two countries on a collision course.

Tehran believed Washington was using the ceasefire to establish a shipping route through waters along Oman’s coast that would gradually neutralize Iran’s newest and most powerful source of leverage.

The United States viewed such a corridor as insurance against another Iranian closure of the Strait.

Deeping mistrust also poisoned the negotiations.

After both sides resorted to strikes and counter-strikes to stake out their positions, Trump declared the ceasefire over, threatened to “finish the job” and used language seemingly intended to validate every Iranian suspicion about U.S. intentions.

Tehran clearly concluded that renewed war was inevitable and that it had to close the Strait to preserve its most valuable asset.

[The point is that the Strait was not a purely Iranian asset, but an international waterway according to the UN Law of the Sea, and in any case Oman was a maritime power with its own rights.]

Vaez muses that perhaps Iranian leaders mistook American brinkmanship for a settled decision to return to all-out war.

But by acting on that belief, they helped convert fear into fate, unravelling the understandings in less time than it took to reach them.

Each side treats the other’s actions as proof of aggression, and its own escalation as an act of defence.

Moreover, both countries believe time is on their side.

Iran expects oil shocks and international market turmoil, as well as the political calendar [the U.S. mid-term elections this November], to exhaust Washington’s resolve.

The United States expects financial attrition and military degradation to exhaust Tehran’s.

Neither has a path to victory.

Yet each may feel compelled to prove that it can endure more pain than the other.

Vaez states succinctly that this is the logic of a forever war: Each side uses violence to test the other’s endurance.

War becomes negotiation by other means.

The most plausible off-ramp is a narrow and temporary modus vivendi over the Strait of Hormuz that gets back to the memorandum.

Vaez suggests that Iran could halt attacks on commercial shipping and accept a transparent notification system of a vessel’s origin, destination and cargo to a joint maritime coordination centre administered by Iran and the Gulf states.

The United States could commit to upholding freedom of navigation as a general matter, but – for the sake of re-establishing regular flows through the Strait – would agree on an interim basis to scale back the use of alternative routes as a mechanism for circumventing Tehran.

The Gulf States, of course, will worry that such interim arrangements could become permanent, undermining the principle of freedom of navigation.

That is all the more reason for investing in the diplomacy required to reach a more durable arrangement, writes Vaez.

After all, the United States and Iran are at war over an issue not in dispute before the United States and Israel attacked on February 28.

Today’s conflict is not the solution to yesterday’s failure. It is its offspring.

Vaez aptly concludes that the lesson here is not simply that diplomacy failed.

It is that Washington and Tehran treated the MoU not as a bridge from war to diplomacy but as an extension of war by other means.

Extreme danger lies in the fact that if the antagonists allow even this modest understanding to lapse, the next ceasefire will become merely the pause before the next battle – and consequently war, rather than diplomacy, could well become the permanent condition.

The writer can be reached at: shashimalla125@gmail.com