The US-Iran Pause Will Die Where the Last Two Ceasefires Did: Lebanon

This war has already produced two ceasefires, and both are dead. The first, brokered by Pakistan in April, started unraveling within a day over whether it covered Lebanon. The second, an interim memorandum signed in mid-June, collapsed on July 7 when Iran fired on merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz and President Trump declared the deal over. Now comes attempt number three: on Sunday, the US and Iran paused strikes for a second straight day¹ after nearly two weeks of nightly exchanges, with UN Ambassador Mike Waltz saying Trump is "giving talks some space." An Omani delegation's arrival in Tehran reportedly triggered the American decision to hold fire², and oil markets exhaled: Brent fell nearly 5% to about $92³ on Monday after closing above $100 last week⁴ for the first time since May.

I think a third interim deal is genuinely likely, probably within weeks, because the dispute that killed the second one is administrative and both capitals want out of the current tempo. I also think that deal will fail the same way its predecessors did unless it does the one thing the last two texts refused to do: put Lebanon inside the agreement, with a timetable and a verification mechanism. Nothing in the past seventy-two hours suggests that is coming, which is why the honest description of this pause is a reload with an option on peace attached.

Start with the solvable half. The July fighting was about who administers the Strait of Hormuz, the channel carrying roughly a fifth of the world's oil, which Iran has effectively controlled since the war began in February. Tehran insists the June deal lets it manage shipping for now; Washington backed an alternate transit route hugging Oman's coast, Iran fired on vessels using it, and thirteen nights of US strikes followed. But the compromise mediators are now circulating, having Iran run vessel transit with fewer restrictions on ships¹, is a traffic-and-tolls negotiation. It is ugly, but it is priceable, and Iran's foreign ministry says the technical talks with Oman made progress. Disputes that reduce to fee schedules and routing charts get settled.

Lebanon is a different kind of problem. On Sunday, Iran's supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, elevated after the US-Israeli assassination of his father on the war's first day, told Hezbollah that the preservation of Lebanon's territorial integrity and the "absolute, unconditional termination" of Israeli attacks remains his primary condition for peace with Washington, a demand Tehran enshrined in the first clause of the June memorandum⁵. Israel, for its part, signed a US-mediated framework with Lebanon on June 26 that promises a phased withdrawal from the roughly one-fifth of Lebanon it occupies, but with no timetable, and conditioned in practice on Hezbollah disarming first. Two mutually exclusive sequences, each demanding the other side take the first irreversible step.

The history here explains why Tehran wants it in writing. In April, Netanyahu's office declared the ceasefire "does not include Lebanon"⁶, and within a day Israeli strikes killed more than 300 people across Lebanon⁷, nearly wrecking the truce before negotiations began. Before that, UN peacekeepers counted more than 10,000 Israeli violations⁵ of the 2024 Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire. Whatever else Khamenei's condition is, it is not irrational maximalism. It is what a negotiator demands after unverified promises have failed twice.

The case for optimism deserves a fair hearing, because parts of it are correct. Exhaustion is real on every side. The war has cost the Pentagon $37.5 billion by Defense Secretary Hegseth's own count⁸. Gasoline is above $4 a gallon with midterm elections roughly 100 days away⁹, and enough Republicans have defected on war powers votes to make every new appropriation politically expensive. Optimists also point to 2006, when UN Resolution 1701 ended the Israel-Hezbollah war on messy, incompletely implemented terms that nonetheless prevented full-scale war for years. Exhaustion, on this view, carries imperfect deals over the line. I agree that exhaustion will produce a signature. But exhaustion already produced two signatures this year, and both deals died within weeks, because the fronts left outside the text kept shooting. The 1701 analogy cuts the other way once you notice the difference: 1701 covered the front that was actually firing. The June memorandum deliberately left Lebanon's implementation vague, and April's ceasefire disputed whether Lebanon was covered at all.

The second excluded front now has momentum of its own. On July 25, after Saudi jets struck the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, the Houthis, the Iran-aligned movement controlling northwestern Yemen, hit Saudi Aramco facilities in Jizan and Yanbu with dozens of missiles and drones¹⁰, their first strikes on Saudi oil since a 2022 truce. Yanbu matters more than the burning refinery at Jizan: with Hormuz blockaded, Saudi Arabia has been pumping a record 7 million barrels a day westward through its East-West pipeline¹¹ to Red Sea terminals, making Yanbu the kingdom's last functioning export door. Riyadh's coalition vowed to respond "uncompromisingly" while the Houthis promised escalation for escalation¹². The Houthis are signatories to nothing being drafted in Muscat, and if they close Bab al-Mandeb while Hormuz stays constricted, the global supply shock arrives regardless¹³ of what Washington and Tehran sign.

Then there is what Washington is doing with its other hand. The White House has asked Congress for $87.6 billion in supplemental spending¹⁴, $67.1 billion of it for the Pentagon, with $21 billion for munitions as the single largest item. A CSIS analysis¹⁵ found the request is driven less by bills already incurred than by the Pentagon's priorities for future conflicts, and the FY27 budget separately seeks $76.3 billion for munitions, a 185% jump¹⁶ over this year. Meanwhile the Pentagon quietly rebuilt its casualty database around a new "Overseas Operations" category starting July 7, the same date the administration told Congress a new conflict began¹⁷ for War Powers purposes, after cutting the official Iran war death toll from 18 to 14. Rep. Thomas Massie called it a ruse of "pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire"¹⁸ to dodge the 60-day authorization clock. None of this proves bad faith at the negotiating table. It does show an administration building the legal and material runway for a longer war, which lowers its cost of walking away, and a government stockpiling that option is not one preparing to spend hard leverage on its ally's behavior in Lebanon.

Which brings us to the actual decision point, and it is not in Muscat. Netanyahu arrives in Washington on Tuesday¹⁹ to meet Trump, and that room is where the third ceasefire's fate gets set, because the Lebanon question was never really a dispute between Washington and Tehran. Iran has already signed a document with Lebanon in its first clause. The government that has never signed one is Israel's, and only Trump has the leverage to change that. If Tuesday produces a Lebanon timetable with verification attached, this pause can become the off-ramp the mediators are advertising. If the readout once again describes Lebanon as a separate track, the fair prediction is a third collapse before the interim deal's 60-day window runs out in mid-August, and the next pause will be purchased at a higher price than $100 oil.