For a moment this week, the freeze between Washington and Tehran looked like it might actually crack. On 23rd September, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi sat down with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in New York — the most senior direct contact between the two sides since the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding fell apart two months earlier. Three days later, Araghchi told the New York Times and The Guardian that the Strait of Hormuz could reopen within a week, if Washington met Tehran’s conditions.

That one conditional sentence tells you almost everything about where this stands. Not resolved. Not fully back to war footing either. Suspended somewhere in between, where both sides already know roughly what a deal would look like, and neither has been willing to move first.

A memorandum that didn’t survive its own deadline

It is worth being honest about what actually collapsed here. The Islamabad Memorandum, signed 17th June after talks Pakistan brokered — with Army Chief Asim Munir reportedly playing a direct role — gave Washington and Tehran 60 days to turn a fragile ceasefire into something lasting. That window closed in mid-August with nothing to show for it. Iran’s position, as Araghchi laid out in a call with Japan’s foreign minister on 8th September, is that the region’s current tension traces back to what he called Washington’s “regrettable violation” of its Islamabad commitments, and that the US returning to those commitments is what would actually normalize the Strait. Washington hasn’t accepted that version of events. And........

© Middle East Monitor