Transcription
The past 3 days alone have been dizzying. Friday brought a fresh round of attacks. Trump insists Tehran broke the truce first. Iran claims Washington struck first and then hit back against Bahrain and Kuwait. By Sunday, both sides had backed off into an uneasy lull, and neither will say plainly what comes next.
From where I sit, untangling exactly who fired first and in what order is genuinely hard to pin down, and I won't pretend to have secret intel that clears it up. But here's the part that keeps getting buried under all the "who broke the ceasefire" coverage. Iran just proved again that it can hit Bahrain and Kuwait basically whenever it wants. That's not a side detail. That's the whole story. A nation that supposedly lost this war, whose top leader was killed back in February, whose nuclear facilities got bombed in June, still has both the reach and the willingness to send missiles into two American-aligned states within 2 days. Before we argue about who's the aggressor this week, sit with that for a second because it tells you something the news cycle keeps skipping over.
This latest confusion isn't really about what happened on the ground. It's about who wins the race to control the narrative. Washington wants this framed as Iranian aggression that justifies more pressure. Tehran wants it framed as American betrayal that justifies abandoning the deal it signed less than 2 weeks ago. Both stories are political spin, and neither answers the real question: Who actually holds the power here? Set the messaging aside and ask the one thing that matters. Who can make the other side's desired outcome impossible? On that, there's zero ambiguity. Iran can, through its grip on the Strait of Hormuz and its reach across the Gulf. That single fact is going to shape everything I say from here on. So keep it in mind, because everything that follows is just another angle on that same truth.
Let me also be upfront about something. A week ago, I would have called the June 17th memorandum signed in Switzerland a real breakthrough, a genuine exit ramp from a conflict that had already spiraled further than Washington ever intended. I still believe that agreement was substantial, and the 60-day roadmap was a real diplomatic win, largely thanks to Pakistani and Omani mediators who deserve way more credit than they're getting. What I got wrong was underestimating how easily that framework would crack the moment either side felt it had room to push. That's on me. Realist theory tells you agreements between mutually distrustful adversaries are inherently fragile, and I let the optimism of the signing ceremony override that lesson for about a week too long.
So, here's where things stand. A ceasefire meant to last 60 days cracked before day 10. A sanctions exemption Washington issued just 5 days before the newest strikes is still technically active. And a White House that can't decide from one day to the next whether it's enforcing maximum pressure or buying time to claim a win it desperately needs. That contradiction isn't accidental. It's a symptom of a country that no longer holds the leverage it believes it does, and that's exactly what I want to unpack today.
One more thing before moving forward, because it explains why this flare-up matters more than the dozen smaller ones before it over the past 4 months. Every previous incident since the June truce got absorbed within a day or two. A statement, a denial, business as usual. This one didn't fade that fast, and timing is why. It hit right as the general license waiver window was being tested by markets. Right as Gulf shipping insurers were beginning to lower risk premiums on the assumption the truce would hold. When a shock lands exactly as confidence is rebuilding, it does more damage than the identical shock would at any other moment. Which is exactly why the coming days matter far more than the headlines suggest.
Rewind to April 7th, because that date explains how we got here. Trump posted that an entire civilization would be destroyed that night if Iran didn't make a deal. Administration officials later admitted, almost embarrassed, that the post was spontaneous and had no connection to any real security strategy. Sit with that. The President of the United States threatened to wipe out a nation of 90 million people in a social media post his own staff later called off-the-cuff. Nobody in that administration grasped what that kind of language would cost them at the bargaining table 3 months later. And frankly, I didn't expect Washington to be the side making concessions by June, either.
I've spent my career pointing out that major powers consistently overrate what coercion can buy them, and I've watched this exact overreach play out in slow motion since February. The strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were pitched to Americans as the knockout blow that would force Iran to surrender. Khamenei's death in the opening strikes was treated in Washington as the moment the regime would crumble. None of it happened. Iran named a successor, kept fighting, shut down Hormuz when it decided the moment was right, and then negotiated a memorandum that included sanctions relief and a path to roughly $300 billion in unfrozen assets. If you'd told the war's architects back in February, "This is where things would stand by late June," they wouldn't have believed you. And that gap between what was expected and what actually happened is the entire story of this conflict, the starting point for any honest analysis of it.
What stands out most looking back over these 4 months is how consistently America's negotiating position weakened without Washington ever admitting it was happening. Back in April at the Islamabad talks, Trump's own envoys described Iran as immovable on enrichment, while Iran's foreign minister said the deal was nearly done and accused Washington of demanding too much. By June, the entire shape of the demands had shifted. The same administration that once called for unconditional surrender ended up signing a memorandum that left enrichment and stockpile levels to be sorted out over the following 2 months, while handing Iran a naval blockade lift and an oil sanctions waiver almost immediately. That's not what surrender looks like. That's what a negotiated retreat looks like when one side realizes midway through that its threats didn't carry the weight it assumed.
There's a deeper blind spot here, too, and it predates April. Washington built its entire Iran strategy on the belief that economic strangulation combined with the threat of force would eventually crack the regime. The same theory behind the original maximum pressure campaign in 2025. What that theory never factored in was China. Throughout the harshest stretch of sanctions, Chinese refiners kept buying discounted Iranian oil, and no amount of Treasury action against shadow fleets or small refineries in Hong Kong and Shandong actually stopped it. I don't think policymakers were oblivious to this. I think they convinced themselves symbolic pressure would eventually add up to real pressure. It never did. And now we're watching that miscalculation unfold in real time because the party that was supposed to be choked off is the one setting the pace of these negotiations.
One more point on this blind spot, because it matters for what comes next. Gulf diplomats and Oman's foreign minister have said for months that Washington lost control of its own Iran strategy, that Israeli pressure dragged the administration into a war it hadn't planned to fight on this timeline. I was doubtful of that claim when it first surfaced in March. That's the kind of thing regional players say to shift blame. But watching the whiplash in American messaging—surrender demands one month, sanctions waivers the next—I think there's more truth to it than I initially credited. And that matters because it helps explain why American leverage eroded so quickly.
There's a generational layer to this blind spot, too, one that doesn't get enough attention. The people who built this strategy cut their teeth on the JCPOA fight, and the 2018 withdrawal. An era when sanctions genuinely worked because the international coalition enforcing them was unified, and Iran's main links to the global economy ran through channels Washington could actually squeeze. That world doesn't exist anymore. China isn't the marginal buyer it was a decade ago. It's the dominant one, and a sanctions playbook built for the old system was always going to underperform against a country with Beijing as its top customer. Washington kept running that old playbook because it had worked before, not because anyone honestly checked whether the conditions that made it work were still there.
Now, let's separate the talk from the actual leverage, because this is where it gets interesting. The rhetoric for over a year has been maximum pressure. Treasury announcements every few weeks, more sanctions on shadow fleet ships, more designations on oil traders in Hong Kong, more statements about cutting off funding to the Revolutionary Guard. That's the public messaging, and it's stayed remarkably consistent since early 2025. But underneath it, the actual capability tells a completely different story, and it shifted dramatically on June 22nd. That day, Treasury issued a blanket 60-day waiver authorizing the production, sale, and delivery of Iranian crude, petrochemicals, and petroleum products through August 21st. Read that again. The same government sanctioning Iran's oil trade just authorized the very trade it had been trying to shut down. That's not a minor tweak. It's Washington admitting, through its actions, not its words, that it needs Iranian oil flowing and Iranian cooperation on Hormuz more than it needs its sanctions regime intact.
Two things follow from that. First, if maximum pressure actually worked the way its architects claimed, you don't need a waiver. You let the pressure keep mounting until the other side breaks. The fact that Washington reached for relief within days of signing the memorandum tells you the pressure wasn't achieving what it was supposed to, and the administration needed something to offer Iran just to keep it engaged. Second, and this is the part most coverage completely misses, China never actually stopped buying Iranian oil through the toughest sanctions. The discount shrank, the shipping got messier, the shadow fleet got craftier, but the money kept flowing. So, the leverage Washington thought it was building was always partial, with a hole in it the size of the Chinese energy market. And the waiver just made official what had been true in practice for over a year.
I call this the leverage inversion, and I want to name it directly because it explains everything else here. A leverage inversion is when the side applying pressure becomes more dependent on cooperation from the side being pressured than the other way around, without either side publicly acknowledging the shift. Washington still talks like it's holding all the cards: maximum pressure, compliance monitoring. But its actions—the blockade lift, the $300 billion asset release framework, the oil waiver—all point to a government that needs this deal more than Iran does. Iran, weakened as it is, still holds the one card that actually moves markets and governments: the ability to make the Strait of Hormuz unreliable whenever it chooses. That imbalance, not the sanctions lists, not the press releases, is the real power dynamic here. Once you see it that way, 18 months of Treasury announcements start looking less like a winning strategy and more like one quietly losing ground while still using the language of dominance.
If you want one image that sums up this inversion, look at a buried detail in the memorandum: a commitment to make Iran's frozen funds fully accessible for payment to whoever Iran's Central Bank designates, with the US agreeing to issue all necessary licenses to make that happen. That's not the language of a winner dictating terms to a beaten opponent. That's the language of a government trying to purchase stability from a counterpart it can no longer simply force into line. Read the actual documents instead of the headlines, and the whole picture shifts.
It's also worth noting what the waiver doesn't cover, because that gap shows where remaining American leverage actually sits. It runs through August 21st and applies specifically to Iranian crude and petrochemical trade. It's not a full rollback of the sanctions architecture. The IRGC designations, the shadow fleet listings, the terrorism finance authorities—all remain in place and could theoretically snap back if the administration decides the deal has failed. So, the leverage Washington retains isn't pressure already in effect. It's the threat of pressure being reapplied. Whether that threat still carries weight after everything Iran has endured since February is a separate question, and honestly, I think it carries far less than it did a year ago.
None of this happens in a vacuum, and I understand why Washington keeps swinging between strikes and waivers. You have to look at what's actually driving the decision-making inside the administration. J.D. Vance publicly praised the memorandum as major progress, citing four wins: IAEA inspection access, a mechanism to reopen Hormuz, a deconfliction process for Lebanon, and a framework for further talks. That's the diplomatic side of the administration claiming credit for de-escalation. Days later, American jets are back over Iranian targets because Trump says the truce was broken. Those two positions can't both be the real strategy. There are two camps inside the same government pulling in opposite directions, and the whiplash between strikes and statements you've seen all week is the visible fallout of that internal split.
There are three paths being weighed by whoever's steering this policy, whether they admit it publicly or not. One, hold the deal, absorb the political cost of looking weak on Iran after months of tough talk, and quietly bank the sanctions waiver as a win nobody wants to defend on camera. Two, resume strikes at the first excuse, satisfy the hawks who never wanted the memorandum, and risk collapsing a framework Pakistani and Omani mediators spent months building. Three, do both. Strike when domestic politics demand it, wave sanctions when markets and Gulf allies demand it, and accept that the resulting policy makes no sense to anyone watching from the outside. We are currently watching option three play out, and I don't think that's a strategy so much as the absence of one.
The hardline case inside this debate is simple, and you've heard versions of it on cable news for weeks. Iran is rebuilding, Iran can't be trusted to keep any agreement, and every day without renewed pressure is another day the regime uses to rebuild its proxy networks and missile arsenal. That argument carries real political weight, especially after a year marked by tens of thousands of deaths during Iran's crackdown on protesters last winter. A fact that gives American hawks a humanitarian case alongside the strategic one. But that case has a structural flaw its supporters never address. Renewed pressure requires renewed leverage, and as I just walked through, the leverage that actually mattered—control over Hormuz and China's willingness to keep buying regardless of sanctions—was never something Washington fully controlled in the first place.
On the other side of this debate are the people who actually negotiated the memorandum, the Witkoff and Kushner channel, the State Department team that built the separate Lebanon ceasefire. And they have their own argument. 60 days isn't much runway. The deal includes real Iranian commitments on enrichment status and IAEA access that didn't exist 18 months ago, and blowing up the framework now just to appease a domestic audience throws away the only tangible progress this administration has to show for a war that's already cost it heavily in regional credibility. Gulf mediators, Qatar especially, have made their frustration with Washington's inconsistency public enough that it's been widely reported, including Doha reportedly sidelining the American Vice President during a June mediation session. That's not how a confident ally treats a partner it trusts to steer the policy.
So, when you watch the next round of statements out of Washington, listen closely for which camp is speaking. The pattern has been consistent. Strikes get announced in bold, decisive language aimed at a domestic audience that wants to see strength. Waivers and de-escalation moves get slipped out quietly through Treasury filings and background briefings designed to avoid the political cost of looking like a retreat. That gap between the loud policy and the quiet policy isn't confusion. It's what it looks like when a government has lost the ability to set the terms and is now just managing the optics of that loss.
Congress hasn't resolved any of this either, and that silence matters more than people realize. There's been no serious push for a war powers vote to put lawmakers on record, no binding resolution on the sanctions waiver either way. When a policy is working and popular, members of Congress race to attach their names to it. When a policy is this incoherent, the safer move is silence. Let the executive branch take the blame if it collapses. Congress's refusal to own any part of this approach tells you that even the people closest to it don't believe the current path is sustainable enough to stake their names on.
Here's my take, and I don't say this lightly after 4 months of watching this war play out. There's something deeply broken about a strategy that bombs a country's nuclear infrastructure in June, kills its supreme leader in the process, and then within weeks finds itself waving the very sanctions it spent years building. All while the core dispute over enrichment sits exactly where it was before the first missile was fired. That's not coercive diplomacy succeeding. That's a major power discovering in real time and at enormous cost the limits of what military force can buy when the other side controls a choke point the global economy can't function without. I'll only draw this parallel once, because I don't think historical comparisons should be overused, but it echoes what Britain learned after Suez in 1956: that the old tools of coercion no longer match the real distribution of power. London believed it could dictate terms over the canal the way it always had. It couldn't.