Iran did not reach a deal with the United States before Monday’s ceasefire deadline. The 60-day memorandum of understanding signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in June expired without replacement. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council announced that the vital waterway would not reopen until the United States “corrects its behavior,” demanding the US end its war on Iran and compensate the country for war damage. Trump responded by demanding a white flag of surrender. The Strait of Hormuz remains blocked. Oil prices have been elevated since Monday afternoon. On Tuesday, two more crew members died in two separate incidents in the same waterway.
The UKMTO Center reported Tuesday morning that a vessel moving through the strait near the Omani coast was struck. One crew member was killed. Hours later, UKMTO reported a second vessel struck in the Strait of Hormuz with an unknown projectile that damaged the starboard side and killed another crew member. Two vessels, two strikes, two deaths, all in a single Tuesday in the Strait that Iran says it controls until the United States agrees to conditions that the United States has not agreed to. The shipping industry is tracking both incidents. Saudi Aramco, which resumed loading crude from within the strait last week after halting for weeks following earlier attacks on its tanker fleet, has tankers waiting to load. The question is whether they will be struck while waiting.
The ceasefire that expired Monday was itself the product of a previous crisis. In late June, after Iran attacked a commercial vessel in the Strait, the US responded with strikes on Iranian missile and drone storage sites and radar facilities. Fighting escalated again in July after Iran struck three vessels in the waterway. CENTCOM responded by striking more than 300 Iranian military targets over three nights, hitting missile and drone sites, naval capabilities, ammunition storage facilities, communications networks and coastal surveillance positions. The three-night campaign was the most intensive US military action against Iran in the conflict to that point. It produced the ceasefire. The ceasefire produced Monday’s deadline. The deadline produced the statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council that the strait stays closed.
The economic arithmetic of the closed Strait is the part that does not resolve with diplomatic language. The Strait of Hormuz handles approximately 20 percent of globally traded oil. Before the conflict began, approximately 21 million barrels of oil passed through it daily. That daily flow is now effectively zero for commercial purposes, with only vessels willing to risk Iranian interdiction attempting the passage, and those vessels taking that risk even as Tuesday’s UKMTO reports confirm the risk is real and lethal. Oil prices have risen since the ceasefire expired because the market has updated its estimate of when the Strait will reopen, and the market’s updated estimate appears to be: not soon.
The specific conditions Iran’s Supreme National Security Council attached to any reopening are worth stating in full because they describe the distance between where the two sides are. Iran wants the US to end the war. Iran wants the US to compensate it for war damage. Iran wants sanctions lifted. Iran wants its nuclear program left intact. These are not negotiating positions designed to produce a deal. They are a statement of what Iran requires before it will allow commercial shipping to pass through the Strait. The US position, as expressed through Trump’s demand for a white flag of surrender, is similarly not a negotiating position designed to produce a deal.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said before the deadline that the two countries had reached “an understanding regarding the map of the transit route” and were working to finalize a joint statement. The joint statement was not finalized. The deadline passed. The understanding about the transit route has not produced an open transit route. Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf claimed Tuesday that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will maintain control over shipping traffic in the Strait until the US agrees to Iran’s conditions. The IRGC is the faction that has attacked the most vessels. It is now declaring itself the permanent authority on who may pass.
Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery appeared on Fox News and said Trump’s threat to bomb Oman if it interfered in US-Iran talks was “overdone,” which is the assessment of a retired military officer with experience in the region who understands that Oman’s continued mediation role is more useful to American strategic goals than its elimination would be. Trump threatened to bomb Oman on Monday. Oman has not yet announced whether it will continue mediating. The mediation has produced the ceasefire that just expired. The absence of mediation will produce whatever comes next.
The American service member death toll in the conflict stands at 18. No deal has been reached. The Strait is blocked. Two more crew members are dead.
Iran’s conditions require the US to end the war and pay reparations. The US demands a white flag of surrender. Two people died in the Strait on Tuesday.
When Iran’s conditions for reopening the Strait require the US to compensate it for a war the US started and the US demands unconditional surrender, what exactly are the two sides negotiating toward?
Sources
Fox News: Iran fails to strike deal with US as deadline passes, Trump calls for white flag of surrender
Fox News Live: Iran ceasefire, oil prices, Hormuz, August 18
