The agreement between the United States and Iran wins: what has changed in two months?

BeirutSixty days. This was the deadline that the United States and Iran gave themselves to transform the memorandum of understanding signed in June into a final agreement. The deadline expires this Monday without this agreement having been reached. And during these two months, the understanding that was supposed to contain the war has been on the verge of causing it to explode again. In fact, in the last few hours Tehran has raised its tone again: a high-ranking commander of the Revolutionary Guard has warned that its defensive stance will become "offensive" and has threatened with "strategic surprises" against the enemy.

The memorandum that expires today established the immediate end of military operations and a 60-day period to negotiate a final agreement. The understanding included the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and left the more difficult issues for a second phase: Iran's nuclear program, sanctions, and frozen Iranian assets. But in July, a new chain of attacks between the United States and Iran brought the process to a head.

Washington launched new attacks against Iranian targets after accusing Tehran of attacking commercial ships in Hormuz. Iran responded by attacking facilities used by American forces in Bahrain and Kuwait, and subsequently other targets in the region. Donald Trump even declared that the agreement was over.

The memorandum of understanding was then on the verge of collapsing, but, despite this, neither country completely closed the door to diplomacy. Contacts continued through mediators such as Qatar and Pakistan, although today everything is practically stagnant.

Washington also had doubts about the extent to which the Iranian negotiators themselves could commit Iran. According to the media outlet Axios, the Trump administration even opened a secret channel, through the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Nechirvan Barzani, to verify with the Revolutionary Guard that what Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi were negotiating had their support. A later attempt to organize secret high-level talks in Erbil never materialized.

No progress on the nuclear file... nor on Hormuz

The nuclear issue, with which Washington justified a large part of its pressure on Tehran, was to be one of the major issues of this second phase. But this negotiation never really got off the ground. Instead, Hormuz has been at the center of the dispute. Iran is trying to transform its ability to control maritime traffic into an economic and political card. The talks with Oman are an example of this. After weeks of technical negotiations, Tehran and Muscat have reached an agreement on the routes that ships should use to cross the strait. But Iran insists that this technical agreement does not mean that Hormuz has to be reopened.

The change in priorities is beginning to become explicit. An Iranian parliamentarian, Alireza Salimi, recently stated that the Strait of Hormuz is now more valuable to Iran than an atomic bomb. A sentence that summarizes the new calculation: while the nuclear issue remains pending, control of the strait offers Tehran an immediate lever of pressure on Washington and its allies.

Maritime traffic reflects this: before the war, about 130 ships crossed the strait every day; now it is a much smaller fraction. Efforts to salvage understanding continue, but, for the moment, without results. Neither side seems willing to yield on the point that today conditions any new agreement.

The Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, said this Saturday that Tehran has not yet decided whether to return to talks with the United States. At the same time, negotiations with Oman continue on navigation routes in Hormuz. Trump, for his part, has further hardened his position. The US president has even suggested that the strait could become US territory. The Iranian response has been immediate: Hormuz "will remain Iranian".

A shake-up across the region

The crisis is also modifying the regional balance. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan have signed a joint defense agreement stipulating that an attack against one of the three will be considered an attack against all. All three countries present it as a defensive pact, but its signing in the midst of the crisis shows that regional powers are seeking to strengthen their own security guarantees.

And in Lebanon, another agreement promoted by Washington is also going through a critical moment. On Saturday, a Hezbollah attack seriously injured three Israeli soldiers. Tel Aviv responded with a wave of attacks in the south of the country that left eleven dead, including women and children. The Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, warned that Israel will settle accounts with its enemies "on all fronts", and the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir demanded to "bomb Beirut" and crush Hezbollah.

For Iran, Lebanon has been part of the equation from the beginning. Tehran had warned from the outset that Israeli attacks against Beirut could derail negotiations. Two US-driven processes are once again caught in the same regional escalation. The memorandum was meant to be a bridge between war and diplomacy. Sixty days later, the war has not ended. It has changed its form, its stage, and its price.