The White House blew up the Hormuz cease-fire agreement because it didn’t understand—or didn’t care—what it had agreed to. The results will cast a long shadow over the strait.
When it comes to peace and cease-fire agreements, details matter. This applies to any international agreement, of course, but when armed conflict is involved, the lack of trust or goodwill between the parties allows for almost no room for error or imprecision. Even if never brought before any judicial body, the signed text of an agreement is the only way to establish exactly what the parties actually agreed to.
The White House blew up the Hormuz cease-fire agreement because it didn’t understand—or didn’t care—what it had agreed to. The results will cast a long shadow over the strait.
When it comes to peace and cease-fire agreements, details matter. This applies to any international agreement, of course, but when armed conflict is involved, the lack of trust or goodwill between the parties allows for almost no room for error or imprecision. Even if never brought before any judicial body, the signed text of an agreement is the only way to establish exactly what the parties actually agreed to.
Before going any further, a caveat. As is often the case with international agreements, translation issues are a significant concern. According to images released via Iranian state media, U.S. President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian each signed both English and Farsi versions of the text. My assessment is based upon a scan of the signed English text released by the White House. Absent contrary language in the agreement, however, both versions are equally official and controlling, and without a careful comparison of the two by a qualified translator, there is no way to know how they might differ or how significant any differences might be.
Even in a single language, small differences in wording, structure, or sequencing can have potentially life-or-death consequences. Any vagueness at all opens the door to disputes over interpretation. In the 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement, for example, the Taliban promised to release “[u]p to five thousand (5,000) prisoners,” and then quickly stepped up their attacks specifically to capture more prisoners to release.
It is not uncommon for teams of experienced negotiators, specialists, and subject-matter experts to work for months debating every comma and semicolon in a lengthy peace or cease-fire agreement text; the 259-page 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army includes a 50-page annex covering implementation of cease-fire and security arrangements.
This level of care has developed in response to hard-learned lessons that went unheeded during the negotiations leading to the U.S.-Iran agreement. By any measure, this process produced a deeply flawed text. It is very short—the official, signed English-language version runs just over two pages—and is vague, ambiguous, and often opaque.
Its very first words portend problems to come; whatever the parties choose to call it, this agreement is in no meaningful sense a memorandum of understanding, which by definition would be intended by the signatories to be nonbinding. While there are points of clarity, ambiguities and almost indecipherable language extend through even the most important elements of the agreement. Elements that would normally be considered crucial to this sort of agreement, such as monitoring and dispute resolution mechanisms, are either missing entirely or are so briefly addressed as to be almost absent.
It is impossible to know for sure what may have been going through the minds of the negotiators, the signatories, or their advisors. It does appear, however, that Iran specifically negotiated language that would give it space to assert managerial control over the strait, and then proceeded to try to do so. The key passage is from paragraph 5 of the agreement, and reads: “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.”
U.S. negotiators and leadership seem to have failed to understand (and possibly care about) these details, leading to conflicting efforts to control the strait. Iran then used force (arguably within the scope of the agreement) to implement its arrangements, and the U.S. responded by violating the agreement. Both signatories have now at least temporarily jettisoned the agreement and are exchanging standoff attacks, leaving them even further from any stable resolution.
Iran has a reasonable argument that it didn’t violate the terms of the agreement, at least not until after the United States began striking targets inside Iran. Nothing in the agreement requires that Iran allow every commercial ship through the strait. Indeed, the proportionality language in paragraph 4 of the agreement implicitly recognizes that Iran may not do so, at least for the first 30 days of the agreement.
The agreement only requires that Iran make arrangements for the safe passage of commercial vessels as per paragraph 5, using very different language from the provision in paragraph 4 requiring that the United States “fully end” its blockade of Iranian ports. Unlike several provisions in other paragraphs, the text does not require mutual agreement on or consent to these arrangements. It includes no further detail on what the arrangements might entail, how they are to be implemented, or limitations on how Iran may enforce them.
Iran does indeed appear to have made arrangements that comply with the letter of the agreement. These arrangements require that all ships 1) apply for and receive a Persian Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA) transit permit, and 2) only use Iran’s approved transit corridors through the strait, which run through Iranian territorial waters. While there are obvious objections to those requirements, they do not violate anything in the agreement in and of themselves.
The agreement also does not explicitly prohibit any and all Iranian use of force against commercial ships. (Potential violations of international maritime law are separate questions, and given that Iran does not consider itself bound by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea while the US considers itself bound by parts but not all of it, more complicated than they might seem.) The agreement’s first paragraph prohibits the signatories from using force against each other but says nothing about the use of force against third parties.
All of the reported Iranian shipping strikes to date have targeted ships attempting to transit the strait outside the Iranian-approved corridor (and presumably without a PGSA permit). If Iran is attempting to enforce the arrangements required by the agreement, some use of force is at least arguably compliant with the text.
The United States appears to have made specific efforts to deny Iran managerial control over the strait. The Joint Maritime Information Center (part of the US-led Combined Maritime Forces) has repeatedly advised commercial ships to use a non-Iranian-approved transit corridor since the agreement. U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions against the PGSA were not removed as part of the agreement, and OFAC has warned that “[a]nyone cooperating with the so-called strait authority” may be “exposed to sanctions risk.” The agreement does not explicitly prohibit these measures but very clearly does ban any U.S. use of force against Iranian territory or assets.
Given all the circumstances, it is therefore entirely plausible that Iranian leadership genuinely believes it has held up its end of the bargain, and that the United States has ignored significant elements of it. The U.S. may well have encouraged such a perception when Trump almost immediately ignored the agreement’s clear and explicit prohibition of threats of force. It provides a coherent rationale for almost every step Iran has taken since late June. Iranian leadership also appears to have coordinated consistent public messaging based not just upon broad accusation of U.S. bad faith, but on the specific provisions above.
None of this is a defense of Iran or its conduct. The entire agreement is deeply flawed as written and may well be difficult or impossible to reconcile with other elements of international law. If faithfully implemented to the letter, it could well destabilize the entire region. There is reason to believe, moreover, that Iranian leadership also misunderstood key elements of at least the English version of the text. The agreement’s provisions on Lebanon, for example, are not binding on Israel and give the United States a great deal of latitude, while the provisions on temporary sanctions relief leave in place OFAC measures that in practice superseded much of that relief.
In any case, Iran’s perception of this process casts a long shadow over any future effort to manage this conflict and reopen the strait. There is no reason to believe that the U.S. or any other power is both willing and able to force Hormuz open without Iranian consent; any path to a stable resolution to the crisis must eventually end up at the negotiating table. Without some belief that the written text of an agreement has some value, even the smallest preliminary steps toward that table can prove incredibly difficult. Addressing those challenges will require—at a bare minimum—a thorough understanding of what’s gone wrong so far, and the dangers of careless negotiation going forward.