The breakdown of the ceasefire between the US and Iran was perhaps the least surprising news this week. The 14-point plan – AKA the memorandum of understanding (MoU) – signed by Donald Trump in Versailles at the end of the G7 summit on June 17 and by the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, the same day had always felt dangerously impermanent.

So the return to what analysts coyly refer to as “kinetic warfare” and journalists call “bang-bangs” seemed inevitable.

For Ben Soodavar, an expert in decision-making in war at King’s College London, the agreement was a “a ceasefire with a built-in detonator”, which has now “gone off”.

There was nothing in the agreement to resolve the underlying problems which had led to the war in the first place. The issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions has not been resolved, Israel and Hezbollah continue to exchange strikes in southern Lebanon, and Iran has retained the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and cause economic chaos whenever it chooses. This week it chose to do just that.

Read more: Iran ceasefire was always going to break – here’s why

Trump, meanwhile, was attending the Nato summit in Ankara, surrounded by allied leaders who need the strait to be open as badly as anyone. Quite apart from losing face at the collapse of his much-vaunted deal, the incident will have provided a reminder, if Trump needed one, that America’s Nato allies declined to come to his rescue when he asked early in the conflict.

That’s not to say that all the pressure is on the US president. Iran’s leadership are also believed to be deeply divided over the deal, with the vice-chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Commission, Mahmoud Nabavian, for example, warning in June that the deal would turn Iran into a........

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