And so to war. Again. After a ceasefire and a hiatus, Donald Trump is now into the second day of a new phase of bombing Iran, with the US military claiming to have struck 170 Iranian targets in the past 48 hours.

This is no surprise. Speaking at the Nato summit in Ankara this week, Donald Trump said he believes the US-Iran memorandum of understanding is “over”. He described Iran’s leaders as “evil, sick people” and threatened renewed military action and even a new blockade of Iranian ports, while also leaving the door open to further negotiations.

Those remarks followed a fresh round of US strikes on southern Iran after Tehran attacked commercial vessels transiting the southern part of the strait of Hormuz, outside the shipping corridor it had designated, and were also the precursor for today’s attacks. Late on Wednesday, explosions were reported across a further three locations in Iran. Conflict will only escalate from here. On Truth Social, the president wrote: “This is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran. If it happens again, it will get much worse!”

Yet the memorandum’s collapse did not begin this week. It began unravelling almost from the moment it was signed because of the central problem that has haunted US-Iran diplomacy for decades: there is no credible basis for trust. Tehran had little reason to believe Washington would deliver durable sanctions relief, abandon its longstanding strategy of coercion and regime change, or refrain from returning to those same policies once Iran had surrendered its principal sources of leverage. That is why the struggle over Hormuz has become the memorandum’s defining issue rather than a peripheral dispute.

On paper, the memorandum offers a pathway to de-escalation. Its logic is sequential: shipping through Hormuz would resume under Iranian “arrangements”, the US blockade on Iran would be lifted, Tehran would receive an oil waiver and access to portions of its frozen assets, threats........

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