'For 60 Days Only': The Four Words Keeping the US and Iran at War

The most consequential words in the fourteen-point peace deal the United States and Iran signed on June 17 sit in paragraph five. Iran, the Islamabad Memorandum¹ says, will arrange safe passage for commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz "with no charge, for 60 days only." Washington read that as a temporary technical detail inside a ceasefire. Tehran read it as a deed of title: free passage is the sixty-day exception, and charging ships is the rule that resumes on day sixty-one. As the Associated Press reported² this week, "Iran asserts it has the right to manage traffic and potentially charge fees," and the US disputes that. Nearly everything that has gone wrong since flows from those two irreconcilable readings.

And a great deal has gone wrong. The US naval blockade of Iranian ports, lifted after the June deal, went back into effect on July 14³. Within a day, CENTCOM said⁴ a US aircraft had put Hellfire missiles into the smokestack of the Curacao-flagged tanker Belma as it sailed for Iran's Kharg Island export terminal. American jets have hit Iranian coastal targets for four consecutive nights, killing at least seven soldiers at a barracks in Bampour. Iran declared the memorandum voided on Wednesday⁵, with its lead negotiator, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, saying the country is "in an essential and existential war with America," while Iranian missiles and drones flew at US-aligned targets in Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait, whose forces intercepted four cruise missiles and 21 drones⁶. Four and a half months into a war President Trump insists he wants to end, the obvious question is what actually keeps it running.

My answer is that this is no longer primarily a war about nuclear enrichment, regime survival, or even retaliation. It is a property dispute over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman through which roughly a quarter of the world's seaborne oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas⁷ moved before the war. Iran is trying to convert wartime control of that chokepoint into a permanent, revenue-generating institution. The United States is trying to destroy that claim. Every blockade, tanker strike, and voided agreement since June is downstream of that collision, and the actor with the most concrete material stake in keeping the confrontation alive sits in Tehran.

The mechanism is worth spelling out. Since closing the strait when the war began on February 28, Iran has run it as a gatekeeper, at times charging select vessels as much as $2 million per transit⁸ for negotiated passage. In May it established a Persian Gulf Strait Authority to formalize the system. A Clingendael analysis⁹ found that the authority functions largely as an administrative front for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the parallel military that answers to Iran's supreme leader and already controls an estimated 40 percent of the economy¹⁰, and that a functioning toll regime could yield tens of billions of dollars a year. For the IRGC, the war has been a windfall: elevated political power at home, dominance of future reconstruction, and a potential Suez-scale revenue stream that exists only so long as Iran's grip on the strait survives the peace. Vice President JD Vance, hardly a dove on this file¹¹, described Iranian hardliners who began targeting ships after the June deal because, in his telling, "We're scared about losing our leverage."

There is a serious counterargument, and it deserves a fair hearing because parts of it are true. It holds that Washington is the real obstacle to peace: that a blockade of all commerce entering and leaving Iranian ports is not defense but economic strangulation, an act historically understood as war; that the memorandum obligated the US to lift the blockade and stay lifted, so reimposing it attacks the deal's core bargain; and that this is all happening in a constitutional vacuum. On the last point the record is damning. The House voted 215-208 in June¹² to direct Trump to end hostilities, the Senate followed 50-48¹³, the first time both chambers have passed such a war powers measure for an ongoing war, and it was the tenth congressional attempt¹⁴ to rein the conflict in. None of it binds the president, who told an interviewer that on his war powers "There are no limits." A four-month campaign of blockade and airstrikes that Congress has twice voted against and cannot stop is exactly the executive war the 1973 law was written to prevent.

But an indictment of American process is not an account of who is pulling the war forward, and the timeline keeps refusing to cooperate with the strangulation theory. After the June 17 signing, CENTCOM lifted the blockade within a day¹⁵ and Washington issued a sixty-day license for Iranian oil sales. Shipping resumed through a widened route near Oman, outside Tehran's control. Iran's response was to warn ships off that route, and then, on July 7, to put missiles and drones into three commercial vessels¹⁶: the Qatari LNG carrier Al Rekayyat, left burning and at risk of exploding, and the Saudi supertanker Wedyan among them. Iranian state media explained the targeting¹⁷ by noting the ships had used "the Omani route" with US Navy support. Only after that did Washington revoke the oil waiver, strike IRGC boats, and, a week later, restore the blockade. The ships Iran hit were Qatari, Saudi, Emirati, and neutral-flagged, not American; the seafarer killed in Tuesday's attacks was Indian¹⁸. Qatar and Saudi Arabia formally held Iran responsible. And when the two governments' toll ambitions collided with their own allies, the asymmetry was instructive: Trump floated a 20 percent US transit fee and killed it within a day³ after Gulf rulers objected, while the IRGC answered the blockade by threatening every economy on earth¹⁹, declaring regional energy exports would be "either for everyone or for no one."

I want to be precise about what this argument does not claim. It does not make the US blockade legal, wise, or cheap; compellence by naval force validates every hardliner in Tehran who says compromise equals siege, and defense contractors do profit from the replenishment cycle²⁰. But Lockheed does not decide whether ships get shot at in the strait. The IRGC decides that, and unlike any actor in Washington, it faces a direct institutional loss, measured in the tens of billions, if the strait reverts to an ordinary international waterway. Meanwhile the world pays the carry cost: Brent crude is back above $85, some 15 percent over pre-war levels¹⁹, in what the World Bank calls²¹ the largest oil market disruption in history, and the strategic reserves that cushioned the first shock have largely been drawn down⁴.

Which brings the story back to paragraph five. The June deal failed not because either side lacked reasons to want peace but because it deferred the only question that matters, what happens on day sixty-one, into four ambiguous words that each capital read as victory. Any future ceasefire that repeats that evasion will die the same death, because the IRGC will spend the interim consolidating its toll and Washington will spend it drilling escort routes to break it. The war will end when one side's answer to who governs Hormuz becomes untenable, and I see no evidence yet that either believes it is theirs.