The Iran War Is Back, Sort Of

President Donald Trump has been fond of describing U.S.-Iranian clashes during a ceasefire as “love taps.” But over the past month, those taps have become deadly blows. On July 8 the president declared the peace memorandum between the two countries “over,” and a few days later he restored the U.S. naval blockade of Iran. Since then, there’s been a gradually escalating air war across the Middle East that has killed at least four U.S. troops and at least 50 Iranians.

Last weekend saw the most intense violence. Iran bombed U.S. troops in Jordan, killing three. Although most of the fighting had been taking place in the countryside, air raid sirens blared in Jordanian cities for the first time in weeks when Iran attacked King Hussein International Airport in the port city of Aqaba on Sunday. Another American died in Iraqi Kurdistan while handling a crashed Iranian drone. After the U.S. military allegedly hit a water plant in southern Iran, the Iranian military bombed water and electrical plants in Kuwait several days in a row. Kuwaitis tell me that the air raids feel more intense now than during the full-blown war in March 2026.

And shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which the post-ceasefire U.S. campaign was meant to protect, has ground to a halt after Iranian attacks killed several sailors. The Iranian attacks that provoked the fighting earlier this month seemingly succeeded. When the U.S. Navy advised ships to continue taking a U.S.-backed safe corridor, a sailor radioed back that they can “fuck off,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Crude oil and gasoline prices are rising back to wartime levels.

The fighting is still ongoing. On Monday morning, the Iran-allied Houthi government in Sanaa—one of two rival governments in Yemen—declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea. Throughout the war and postwar period, Saudi Arabia had managed to reroute a good chunk of its oil exports from Hormuz to the Red Sea.

Still, the fighting is more restrained than it was during the full-on war. The U.S. is not bombing Tehran or killing Iranian leaders; Iran has concentrated its fire on a handful of Arab countries and is mostly not hitting upstream oil infrastructure; and Israel, which provided the Trump administration’s original justification for the war, has stayed out of the fray.

Both U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei have hinted that negotiations are still ongoing. Both sides still seem to be in the mode of trying to get better terms rather than abandoning peace altogether.

The immediate cause of the fighting is two ambiguous clauses in the peace memorandum. Clause 1 commits the two sides to the “permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon” and “ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.” Although Iran understood that to mean a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, the U.S. instead got the Lebanese government to bless a long-term Israeli campaign against the pro-Iran militia Hezbollah. Clause 5 requires Iran to “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge.” Although the U.S. understood that to mean the free flow of traffic, Iran insists that it has the right to force ships through an Iranian corridor.

These disagreements are symptoms of a broader problem: Neither side trusts the other, and each is convinced it can squeeze out a more favorable deal. Iranian leaders re-closed Hormuz because they believed that the U.S. was engaged in “a concerted effort to erode [Iranian] leverage” and that another U.S.-Israeli attack was “inevitable,” Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American academic who previously advised U.S. diplomats, wrote in the Financial Times. He pointed to the situation in Lebanon, the U.S. failure to give Iran back some of its frozen property, and a continued U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf.

Iranian leaders felt vindicated in their theory when U.S. President J.D. Vance told The Michael Knowles Show this month that “we have the option of banking our wins and then, of course, doing things on top of that,” portraying the peace memorandum as a chance “to refill some stocks, and then to see where the hand is.”

From the perspective of the U.S. and its Arab partners, of course, letting Iran take control of Hormuz by force would be a very bad precedent for freedom of navigation. And although the peace memorandum promised to normalize relations in exchange for solving the Iranian nuclear program, Rubio told reporters last month that it was “going to have to depend on progress made on a host of other security issues,” hinting that the U.S. had other, hidden demands.

Along with the tragic human cost of escalation—people are still being killed after they were told that peace is at hand—this game of chicken is incredibly risky for everyone involved. The U.S. military has run through much of its air defense ammunition, making it easier for Iran to land hits on sensitive targets. “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” an official told The Washington Post on Sunday.

The buffers that prevented a global oil supply crisis last time have also been used up. At the same time, the U.S. and its partners have shown that they can severely damage infrastructure in Iran, a country that is already suffering from economic meltdown. Reimposing the blockade alone cuts off one of Iranians’ most important lifelines.

One or both sides could still blink, as they have in the past. “We’re not just going to bomb and bomb and bomb. We’re going to try to use our military force as one of the many tools that we have to solve the problem,” Vance told The Joe Rogan Experience last week. Iranian Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf gave a TV interview last week telling Iranians not to “fear” diplomacy, because “negotiations at this stage do not amount to capitulation.”

Or things could get downright worse. The U.S. military is bringing more fighter jets and aerial tankers from Europe to Israel, signs of a buildup toward a larger campaign. (Iran had reportedly hit several aircraft on the ground in Jordan. Israeli airspace is more heavily defended.) Trump himself told reporters last week that he was considering seizing Iran’s oil terminal at Kharg Island or raiding a bunker called Pickaxe Mountain, and The Wall Street Journal confirmed that he was being briefed on these options.

From the beginning of the war, Trump has been tempted by the idea that a single simple, overwhelming escalation will force Iran into submission, solving the problems of the Middle East once and for all. Despite the experience of the past few months, he doesn’t seem to have shaken that idea. “We’ll find out whether or not we settle with them, or we just finish it off,” he told an audience at the U.S. Army War College last week.