Hostilities between Washington and Tehran have resumed in full, ending the fragile calm that followed the June ceasefire. Iran struck three commercial tankers in the Strait of Hormuz on July 7, and the United States answered within hours, hitting more than eighty targets across Iranian territory. A second wave followed the next day, striking closer to ninety sites, including Kharg Island, through which most of Iran’s oil exports flow. Tehran responded by launching dozens of strikes on American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait.

Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump declared the Memorandum of Understanding “over,” calling Iran’s leadership “scum” and “cuckoo.” Consequently, oil prices jumped and markets across Europe wobbled, a reminder of how quickly this war can reach beyond the region.

Memorandum of Misunderstanding

Call it a memorandum of misunderstanding rather than a working ceasefire. Its two pages were meant only to halt the fighting and open a sixty-day window for talks, yet even that modest job proved beyond it, since the clauses meant to hold the guns silent were vague enough to mean whatever each side needed them to mean.

Iran read the Hormuz provision as granting Tehran sole authority over which ships could pass, while Washington read the identical sentence as guaranteeing free transit for everyone. Vance eventually shrugged that “words don’t matter,” an odd admission from the lead negotiator of a ceasefire meant to stop a war, while Iranian officials treated that same wording as binding law.

Both governments entered the arrangement with fundamentally different readings of its terms, and so when accusations of violation began flying in both directions, the collapse revealed itself as something that had been inscribed into the agreement from the very beginning.

Israel’s Calculus

Underneath the diplomatic confusion sits a harder truth about Israel’s role. Netanyahu was never a signatory to the MoU, and reports describe him as furious once it was signed, since it granted Iran a ceasefire in Lebanon while leaving Hezbollah’s presence there unaddressed. Days after Versailles, he declared that Israel’s “struggle is not over” and that its forces would remain in southern Lebanon for as long as necessary.

This is consistent with a decades-long pattern. If Israel once treated Iran’s nuclear ambitions as a reason to rush toward regional peace, Netanyahu inverted the logic, using the same threat to justify holding territory indefinitely. A weakened, chaotic Iran, even one resembling Iraq, Syria, or Libya after their respective collapses, suits Netanyahu’s project better than a negotiated settlement would. Regional hegemony does not require a friendly Tehran. It only requires one too broken to project power.

Trump’s Corner

This is where Trump finds himself boxed in. Iran’s central demand throughout these talks has been an end to Israeli operations in Lebanon and, by extension, a check on the wider genocide in Gaza. Trump cannot deliver that, because Israel’s influence over American politics runs deep enough that no administration, Republican or Democratic, has managed to compel Netanyahu into a course he rejects.

Vance can insist that the Strait of Hormuz “is going to be open,” yet Washington has no comparable leverage to force Israel out of Lebanon. Every time Iran ties its own de-escalation to Israeli restraint, Trump is left promising something he cannot secure from his own ally.

Trump and Israel have never actually been fighting the same war, even though they’ve shared the same battlefield. Trump’s objective was narrow and transactional from the start, strip Iran of its nuclear program, force a quick capitulation, and get back to the business of lower oil prices before the midterms. Netanyahu’s objective runs far deeper and has nothing to do with a calendar. He wants Iran too broken to sustain Hezbollah and too broken to ever again constrain what Israel does in Lebanon or Gaza.

Only one path actually resolves the US-Iran war quickly, and it starts with Washington letting go of Israel. A withdrawal of unconditional American support and funding for Israel’s campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon would register in Tehran as a meaningful signal of goodwill, potentially opening a path toward reconciliation with Washington even under the assumption that Israel would continue its operations independently.

Escalation offers no such shortcut. Every strike deepens the standoff without ever addressing what Iran actually wants from Washington, which means the war keeps resetting instead of ending. Trump’s problem is that the one lever fast enough to get him out before November is also the one lever his own coalition would never let him pull.

No Easy Way Out

None of this matches what Trump signed up for in February. The war began as a promise of swift regime change following the killing of Khamenei. Instead, four months later, hardline factions in Tehran remain firmly in control, and the fighting keeps resetting to zero. Domestically, patience is thinning fast. The Senate’s brief flirtation with a resolution to pull US forces out of the conflict showed cracks even among Republicans, and gas prices, the one metric Trump has repeatedly tied his credibility to, are climbing again as the midterms approach in November.

An unpopular, open-ended war is rarely a winning proposition heading into an election year, and this one offers Trump no clean exit. He can escalate and risk a drawn-out entanglement he never wanted, or he can negotiate from a weaker position than the one he abandoned this week. Either way, the trap closes a little tighter with every strike.