There are ceasefires and there are 60-day roadmaps, and the gap between them became clear this morning when an Iranian drone struck a Singapore-flagged cargo vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz, ending what had been six days of the most successful peace deal in history, according to both sides.
Trump stood before American farmers at the White House Rose Garden on Thursday night and said, according to Fox News: “We knocked the hell out of them, and now we’re negotiating from a position of pure strength. Pure strength. They know that.” He also said, at a Pennsylvania rally Tuesday: “yesterday 19 million barrels of oil flowed out of the Strait of Hormuz, a very beautiful place.” The beautiful place had a drone strike in it by Friday morning. The 19 million barrels are a smaller number than they were on Tuesday.
JD Vance declared “significant progress” in Switzerland six days ago and described the talks as “a productive 36 hours” before boarding Air Force Two. The productivity included a “deconfliction mechanism” designed to prevent isolated incidents from escalating. The mechanism was in place Friday morning when Iran’s IRGC struck the cargo vessel. The mechanism is, in this sense, a deconfliction mechanism that did not deconflict the incident that followed its creation, which is one measure of its effectiveness.
Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who told his own parliament that Iran obtained through negotiation “several times over” what military action could have produced, responded to Trump’s claim that unfrozen Iranian assets would buy American corn by saying, according to Fox News: “America falsely claims our unfrozen assets will buy their agriculture. Interesting. The only crop we’re harvesting is what you planted: decades of mistrust.” He said this the day before his country’s military hit a civilian ship in the Strait the agreement was supposed to reopen. The metaphor about crops is doing significant work given the subsequent timeline.
The 60-day roadmap has 54 days remaining. The Strait is less beautiful than it was on Tuesday.
When the ceasefire’s deconfliction mechanism fails on day six, what exactly is being deconflicted for the remaining 54?
Sources
Fox News live: Iranian drone strikes Singapore-flagged cargo ship in Strait of Hormuz
Fox News live: US-Iran peace deal, June 25
Raw Story: Trump’s ‘corrupt’ cash deal with Iran roils critics as Strait of Hormuz reopening begins
