Last Friday, a senior US official gave a background briefing to the media and made some news. First, Iranian officials contacted the United States through mediators and essentially apologised for their recent attacks against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. And second, the Trump administration expected Tehran to issue a formal statement reiterating that the chokepoint was open to all traffic. ‘We want them to publicly say that they will stop shooting at ships and explicitly, or at least implicitly, acknowledge that they screwed up,’ the official said. ‘We expect the Iranians to say… that every channel in the strait will be open and that it will be toll-free.’

Instead, what Washington and the Gulf Arab states got was more Iranian strikes on ships that, from Tehran’s vantage point, were conspiring with the US Navy to leave the strait under routes not approved by Iran’s newly enacted Persian Gulf Strait Authority. 

The situation hasn’t gotten any better since. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Washington and Tehran signed in mid-June, which was supposed to reopen the strait, granted Iran the ability to sell its crude oil without penalty and provided both sides with another two months to settle on a more comprehensive deal, has been torn to shreds in a matter of days. The US military has struck hundreds of........

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