For a few fleeting moments during President Donald Trump's dinner date in France on 17 June, the guns of war were silent during the signing of a peace agreement. Three weeks later, during a NATO meeting in Ankara, he referred to the deal and the Iranian leadership as "scum" and declared the deal dead. The result was a genuine "whiplash," but the story is not one of an accord that broke. A one that was constructed from the onset to crack.
Let's set aside the diplomatic jargon, and the Pakistan-mediated Islamabad Memorandum was no peace agreement. After a lengthy war that reportedly did not last longer than a page-and-a-half, it was put together fourteen points of it, by which the American and Israeli strikes, killing the Iranian Supreme Leader and Ali Larijani, one of Tehran's leading negotiators, were meant. The only thing the memorandum did, in fact, was to stop the fighting and give the two sides a sixty-day breathing spell in which they would try to resolve all the issues that the war had left unresolved: the nuclear file, the sanctions regime, the Strait of Hormuz, the foreign troops arrayed around Iran's borders. In fact, it was a truce under the guise of peace, and this is where the majority of the cleavages were to come from.
The first crack is the nuclear question, which the agreement did not settle, but rather, put on hold. Its ninth article merely leaves the "situation as it is" until further negotiations, but no one, not even the International Atomic Energy Agency, can be certain of what this situation is. Thus, when inspectors last confirmed access to the enrichment facilities about a year ago, they found 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, which is short of weapons-grade. Since then, satellite images have indicated that a large amount of the stockpile might have been secretly moved to the city of Isfahan just prior to the Natanz and Fordow attacks, so that the material hit by the strikes may never have been on site in the first place. A settlement that puts off a casus belli has done nothing; it has merely piled up the conflict.
The result was a genuine 'whiplash,' but the story is not one of an accord that broke. A one that was constructed from the onset to crack.
The second split is based on one somewhat fuzzy reference to a shipping lane. Only Article Five obliges Iran to do what it can with the free passage in the Strait of Hormuz, and only for a 60-day period. Washington has taken this as an unconditional offer; Tehran as leverage, particularly when it has its own navy working so hard to clear mines in Omani waters, and it wants the right to inspect the strait, which is not fully under its command. Three commercial vessels, from Liberia, Saudi Arabia and the Marshall Islands, were struck around the same time on 7 July. American Central Command had downed over 80 targets in Iran over the previous 24 hours, and Iranian forces, including shooting down a United States drone, had attacked Bahrain and Kuwait. But that's one of those "off-the-mark" sentences, where there is roughly a fifth of the world's oil and gas, that wasn't meant to take that sort of pressure.
The 3rd clause is missing, not in a clause. Israel wasn't at the negotiation table, and as the Prime Minister of Israel said, “Jerusalem would not accept any deal that it didn't sign.” Israeli bombings in Lebanon have not abated during the ceasefire, and the health ministry in Lebanon has said that 4,321 people have been killed and 12,203 injured from early March until 8 July due to the attacks. Whether or not Tehran's grievance is legitimate, it provides Iranian hardliners with a grievance to press forward, one that even Washington's promises were broken before they could dry.
The division is political and is traversed by both capitals. The high-ranking clerical Assembly of Experts in Iran called the killing of Trump and Netanyahu "a religious duty", and an exponent of the Revolutionary Guard publicly stated that he foretold Tehran would be sabotaging the talks themselves. Their supreme leader, who had been heretofore adored by the people in the streets of Najaf, was murdered, just when the truce was being violated, and that made that thirst for vengeance even more bitter. Trump then revoked Iran's oil waiver early, threatened to shut the Kharg oil export terminal and threatened to take Iran's nuclear power in force, whether he gets a deal or not. That was the problem, though, that there were no domestic audiences being served by either government that were being rewarded for patience.
Trump's own contradictions of saying the deal was dead on 8 July but then saying it was not collapsed and would be revisited are more of a tactic to pressure the agreement to fail than a collapse. In Islamabad, home to the name of this truce, and for a region whose energy corridors flow through the Strait of Hormuz, it was never in question whether this truce would hold up to its first true test. Whether either government would gain more by letting it go than by seeing it fail.