The Islamabad Memorandum did not collapse simply because shipping attacks resumed. It failed because Washington and Tehran signed one text while understanding the bargain differently.
The obvious explanation for the collapse of the Islamabad MoU is the correct one as far as it goes: attacks on commercial shipping resumed in the Strait of Hormuz, Washington revoked Iran’s oil licence, the strikes restarted and on 8 July President Trump declared the memorandum “over”. Iran, or something wearing Iran’s colours, broke the deal. Case closed.
Except that this explains the trigger and not the collapse. Ceasefires absorb violations all the time. This one had no capacity to absorb anything, because the two governments had signed a single text, while holding incompatible ideas of what either of them had just given up. The shipping attacks did not create that problem. They revealed how little the agreement had been built to survive.
Start where Washington starts and give it its best argument rather than its worst.
The best argument is not that Tehran is irrational or lying. It is that Tehran is not a single actor and cannot deliver what it signs. The Islamic Republic is a coalition of the presidency, the Supreme Leader’s office, the Revolutionary Guard and a network of partners with their own budgets and their own grievances. An American negotiator who concludes that Iranian commitments are worthless is not necessarily indulging a caricature. He may simply have noticed that the man across the table does not control the men with the limpet mines.
That is a serious problem and no amount of sympathetic reading dissolves it. But it cuts both ways, although Washington never lets it. If Iranian compliance is structurally unreliable, then an agreement that demands one enormous irreversible Iranian concession up front is precisely the wrong instrument. You do not respond to a counterparty with weak internal control by asking it for the single hardest thing it can do. You ask for many small things you can verify.
The American approach to crisis bargaining is like playing poker. Pressure is stacked, deadlines are set, chips are pushed forward and the opponent is expected to fold or call. Iranian strategy is more like wrestling, where survival means absorbing force, keeping your feet and waiting for a heavier opponent to overextend.
Neither habit is admirable and neither is a national essence. Both are learned, one from the transactional style of the current administration, the other from four decades of sanctions and asymmetric war, and both were reinforced when Washington abandoned the 2015 agreement it had signed and Tehran discovered that compliance bought nothing durable.
This is the part that most commentary gets backwards. US officials confirm that talks are continuing even now, while they demand that Iran renounce attacks on shipping, keep the strait open and toll-free, and surrender its highly enriched material. That looks incoherent. It is not.
For Washington, force improves the hand you play, so the strikes are an argument made in a different register. For Tehran, resistance is what prevents negotiation from collapsing into dictated surrender, so absorbing the blow is itself a form of speech. Neither side is flipping a switch from war to talks. Both are doing both, deliberately, and each treats the other’s simultaneity as proof of insincerity while treating its own as obviously legitimate.
Now to the deeper failure. Washington offered relief that a president can withdraw by signing something on a Tuesday, and asked in return for enriched uranium to leave the country and infrastructure to be dismantled.
Iran can rebuild all of it eventually. Centrifuge cascades are knowledge as much as hardware, and Tehran has reconstituted after sabotage and strikes before. So, the asymmetry is not permanence against impermanence. It is time. American concessions reverse in an afternoon. Iranian concessions reverse over years, under inspection, and only by handing Washington a fresh public pretext for the next round of strikes. Tehran was asked to pay in months and years and be paid on Tuesdays. It declined, and it was right to decline.
What could actually work
The usual prescription is reciprocal sequencing, independent verification and automatic snapback. That list has been on offer since 2013 and it has a flaw this piece cannot ignore: if the parties cannot agree on what a concession means, they will not agree on what compliance means either. Sequencing does not repair an interpretive gap. It just relocates it.
The way out is to stop requiring shared meaning. Build the narrowest mechanism that works even when both sides despise each other and interpret every clause in bad faith, then leave the grand bargain alone.
That mechanism is Hormuz. Roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption moves through the strait, which is why both parties keep reaching for it and why neither can be trusted with it. Freedom of navigation should be pulled out of the nuclear file entirely and placed in a standing maritime arrangement run with Oman and the Gulf states, with technical triggers rather than political ones, incident reporting that does not depend on either capital’s word, and no linkage whatsoever to enrichment, missiles or proxies. Iran gets revenue that does not evaporate when a president changes his mind. Washington gets an open strait it does not have to escort with a carrier group. Neither side has to concede anything about the thing it actually cares about.
The alternative is what we have now. Safe passage is hostage to a grand bargain, which means every stalled negotiating round is billed to shipowners, insurers and consumers who have never been near the table.
The Islamabad Memorandum did not fail because Iran is treacherous or because America is brutal, though the evidence for both is available. It failed because Washington designed a bargain that required Tehran to make the one move a fractured, encircled regime can never make, and then read the refusal as proof that more force was needed. That reading is now policy and it will keep producing exactly the outcome it claims to be preventing.
Muhammad Amir
Muhammad Amir is a PhD researcher in International Relations at Deakin University, focusing on conflict resolution and regional politics.