Two important events took place last week, virtually at the same time. In the US, the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the American independence from Britain culminated in the speech by President Donald Trump at Mount Rushmore on July 4th. In Iran, the funeral of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, which will last 7 days, also had a crucial moment on July 4th, when the body of the deceased Ayatollah was exposed to the public.
The coincidence of the events was not casual: the two sides, which are engaged in a 60-day negotiation to reach a final peace deal, decided to suspend the process until July 11th, when it will resume in Pakistan, to allow these celebrations on both sides to take place without military or official diplomatic exchanges. Trump said that the US could take advantage of the funerals to hit the crowd and kill what’s left of the Iranian leadership, but he prefers not to do it because the US wouldn’t know who to negotiate with.
All this is happening a few days after the second round of talks in Doha, which took place when military skirmishes between the two sides were escalating. Those skirmishes originated from the fact that Iran hit a vessel that had decided to follow a route not authorised by the regime to cross the Strait of Hormuz. The US denounced this as a violation of the terms of the ceasefire, and reacted by bombing some important military objectives in Iran. Iran retaliated, once again, by attacking the military facilities of US allies in the region.
The first round wasn’t particularly successful as it was shaken by Trump’s post on his social media Truth Social, saying: “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”… “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country.” After that, the Iranian delegation refused to take part in the quadrilateral talks format and only accepted to talk to the Pakistani and Qatari mediators.
In this column we analyse these events and try to get a sense of how the conflict may continue in coming months. First of all, the US claims that Iran violated the ceasefire by hitting a vessel crossing the Strait on a route not authorised by the regime. But this is not a violation, but rather an implementation of the Islamabad Agreement, and in particular of its Article 5. This article states that “Upon the signing of this MoU, 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 Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. […] The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.”
So Article 5 states that it’s Iran’s responsibility only to “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge” for the first 60 days. Then the Islamic Republic of Iran [i.e. not other Iranian authorities that may exist or emerge meanwhile] will have to cooperate with Oman and “other Persian Gulf littoral states” to “define the future administration” of the Strait. The US, or any other country (e.g. China, Russia, EU, etc i.e. the signatories of the JCPOA of 2015) has no voice in this process. So, why Trump is frustrated when Iran implements Article 5?
It is obvious that the US has conceded too much in the Islamabad Agreement. Independent, pro-western think tanks like the London- based IISS, showed how the US got almost nothing out of the Agreement, while Iran got almost everything they asked for. Even pro- MAGA supporters like Oren Cass wrote an article saying “”Some people are confused by this notion that we lost.” In this article, titled “Cutting Bait on a Bad War”, he argues that the best thing that the US could do is 1) recognise that the war was lost; 2) cut the losses; and 3) go back home, trying to minimize the damage. This is exactly what we suggested in our column of the VL on 16 March 2026, two weeks after the beginning of the war, titled “The Unwinnable War in Iran Destabilises the Global Geopolitical Landscape.”
Will Trump learn the lesson? It’s unlikely. If anything, he may double down, as he suggested in a recent Truth post, when he wrote: “It is very possible that they [i.e. Iran] will never learn! There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!” We have extensively written about “The False Myth of Finishing the Job” in our column on June 1st, 2026. However, there are repeated calls from experts in the US that claim that what we see now is just a temporary ceasefire, which is only allowing the US to amass more troops in the Middle East and wait for a cooler period in the region to start a ground invasion, which may take place in December 2026-27.
How credible is this scenario? In our column of 15th June, we discussed a semi-conspiracy theory suggesting a scenario that may chime with this intel from the US and the above-mentioned Truth post. It is worth mentioning it again. “In Iran and elsewhere, some fear this [i.e. the temporary ceasefire agreement] could be a massive trap. The story goes as follows: Trump obtains a ceasefire and — while negotiating the terms of a more durable peace deal — a US vessel, whether civilian or military, is sunk (by unspecified actors). The US would accuse Iran of sinking the ship. At that point the US could claim it had been attacked by Iran and invoke Article 5 of NATO, forcing allies to intervene in the Strait, something they have so far been reluctant to do. Additionally, Trump may use the state of war to further interfere with the midterm elections — some even fear he may ask Congress to pass a bill to postpone them. You think this is too wild? Well, just consider that the US entered World War 1 after the sinking of the RMS Lusitania; they entered WW2 after the Pearl Harbour attack; the US started the war in Vietnam after the incidents of US vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, which historians claimed never happened.”
