Iran Is Negotiating From a Command Structure That No Longer Exists.

Iran and Oman announced this month that they had agreed on shipping route coordinates through the Strait of Hormuz, a temporary corridor meant to last two to four months while a fuller arrangement is drafted. Tehran was careful to specify what the deal is not. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi called it an understanding on passage, not a reopening of the strait, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the same thing in different words days earlier: an agreement with Muscat would not translate into the strait itself reopening, because that, he said, is a separate issue. Donald Trump, in a speech on Long Island, offered a competing description entirely, calling the American naval presence in the strait a wall of steel and threatening to declare Hormuz a US territory outright. Three governments are now describing the same 18 miles of water in three incompatible vocabularies, and none of them has secured a ceasefire.

This is what brinkmanship looks like once the initial objective of a war has already been achieved and abandoned in the same breath. The United States and Israel opened Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury on February 28 with the........

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