Iran and the United States: Prospects After the Failure of the Islamabad Memorandum

Successive Responsibilities, but Not Equivalent Ones

The text of June 17 was relatively explicit. Its first paragraph provided for the immediate and permanent cessation of military operations. Its fourth committed Washington to the gradual lifting of its naval blockade. Its fifth entrusted Iran, for a period of sixty days, with organizing the safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, free of charge, while also providing for talks with Oman to define the strait’s future maritime regime.

If the three ships attacked on July 7 were indeed in Omani waters and were following a route authorized or protected by Muscat, the Iranian strikes most likely constituted the first clear breach of the June 17 agreement. Iran was entitled to challenge the legality of that route, issue warnings, and refuse to guarantee the safety of a corridor it had not itself cleared of mines. It was not entitled, on that basis alone, to attack commercial vessels.

That conclusion, however, cannot absolve Washington of what followed. An Iranian violation did not give the United States a blanket authorization to resume the war. It might have justified a targeted action to protect the ships, neutralize the immediate threat, and prevent its recurrence. Instead, Washington reinstated its blockade, revoked the waivers that had allowed Iranian oil exports, and then launched and intensified a bombing campaign that has continued ever since. These decisions amount to material breaches of paragraphs 1, 4, and 10 of the memorandum.

Responsibility is therefore sequential, but it is not symmetrical. Iran appears to have initiated the armed breach; the United States then transformed it into the wholesale collapse of the agreement. The initial violation may help explain the American response politically. It is neither sufficient to justify that response legally nor capable of legitimizing its scale.

In Tehran and Washington Alike, Peace Has Become a Struggle for Power

The memorandum’s failure is not merely the result of a legal disagreement over the Strait of Hormuz. It forms part of two domestic political confrontations, one in Iran and the other in the United States. In both countries, the question is no longer simply what concessions should be accepted, but which camp will dominate the postwar order.

In Iran, the killing of Ali Khamenei in the U.S.-Israeli strikes of February 28 opened a period of political realignment. The institutions remain in place, but the arbitration once exercised by the Supreme Leader has disappeared. Two competing approaches are now confronting one another at the summit of the state.

The first holds that the political system’s survival and Iran’s military resistance have placed the country in a sufficiently strong position to negotiate. For this current, the immediate priority is no longer the indefinite continuation of the war but reconstruction: lifting sanctions, recovering frozen assets, attracting capital, restoring energy infrastructure, and responding to the expectations of a society exhausted by years of inflation, sanctions, and isolation. Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf partly embodies this pragmatic line. He argues that military leverage must ultimately produce an agreement that provides Iran with security guarantees and the resources required for economic recovery.

Opposing this approach are factions for which war is not only a strategic necessity but also a source of political, economic, and ideological power. The most hard-line elements believe that any agreement with the United States will sooner or later lead to another betrayal. They demand vengeance for Ali Khamenei’s death. Above all, they fear that economic normalization would diminish their role in the economy and society and weaken the networks that prosper under continued sanctions.

It would nevertheless be simplistic to contrast a clearly constituted peace camp with an equally coherent war camp. The real disagreement concerns how accumulated power should be used: should military gains be converted into an economic compromise, or should mobilization be sustained in order to extract further concessions from the United States? On one point, the two tendencies appear to converge: Iran must not accept any return to the pre-February 28 status quo in the Strait of Hormuz.

A comparable divide runs through Washington. It is crystallizing around two figures already engaged, at least implicitly, in the 2028 presidential succession: Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Vance represents the nationalist, restraint-oriented wing of the MAGA movement, wary of protracted wars and open-ended foreign commitments. Rubio embodies a more traditional conception of American power-more interventionist and more closely aligned with Israeli positions. Both men continue officially to defend the Trump administration, but their statements on Iran, Israel, and negotiations reveal different conceptions of the American national interest.

J.D. Vance’s recent statements have given this divide a new dimension. The vice president says he knows "beyond any doubt" that certain members of the Israeli government sought to steer Washington away from an agreement with Iran because they wanted the military campaign to continue. He has also denounced attempts to reshape American public opinion in order to prolong the war and argued that Israeli influence played a role in drawing the United States into the conflict.

These remarks come neither from a marginal lawmaker nor from a traditional opponent of Israel, but from the vice president of the United States. Vance has also argued that Israel is "losing the battle for public opinion" in the United States. That assessment reflects a deeper transformation in American politics: Israel’s standing is deteriorating among the American public, particularly among younger people and Democratic voters, while the long-standing assumption of automatic U.S. financial and military support for Israel is increasingly being challenged.

This shift extends beyond the MAGA movement. A growing number of Democratic candidates now refuse funding from organizations linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, or make the issue a campaign theme. In July, 103 Democratic representatives supported an amendment seeking to eliminate $3.3 billion in aid to Israel-a dramatic break with several decades of bipartisan consensus.

From Self-Defense to Punitive War

Even if one accepts that Iran committed the first armed breach, the legality of the American response cannot simply be presumed.

The Environmental Cost of a War Fought at the Heart of the Global Energy System

Alongside the humanitarian dimension lies another consequence that remains insufficiently considered: the gradual transformation of the Persian Gulf into an epicenter of ecological disaster.

Oil infrastructure, terminals, refineries, tankers, offshore platforms, and petrochemical facilities are concentrated in a semi-enclosed, warm, and shallow body of water. Any fire, pipeline rupture, or damaged vessel can rapidly contaminate fragile coastal areas and affect fisheries, seabirds, coral reefs, and nature reserves.

Images of oil slicks and accounts of animals being harmed or displaced are now circulating widely.

The natural environment cannot be treated as legally inconsequential collateral damage. International humanitarian law prohibits directing an attack against any part of the natural environment that does not constitute a military objective and requires environmental harm to be taken into account in the proportionality assessment.

Hormuz: The Victory Washington Cannot Achieve

Donald Trump appears convinced that sufficiently intense military pressure will eventually force Iran to relinquish the strategic leverage it now exercises in the strait. That assumption, however, rests on a misunderstanding of both geography and Iranian strategy.

An air campaign can destroy radars, vessels, missile depots, and command centers. It can temporarily reduce Iran’s capacity to act. But it cannot durably guarantee the safety of every ship in such a narrow passage, immediately adjacent to Iranian territory and exposed to coastal missiles, drones, mines, and small naval units.

To impose permanent freedom of navigation against Tehran’s will, Washington would have to maintain a substantial military presence, continuously neutralize capabilities dispersed along the coastline, and potentially seize control of certain islands or stretches of coast. Donald Trump has not entirely ruled out a limited ground operation, but such an escalation would open a war of an altogether different nature, with human, military, economic, and political costs that would be difficult to sustain.

Iran, for its part, does not need to control every kilometer of the strait. It needs only to maintain a level of risk high enough for insurers to raise their premiums, shipowners to suspend transits, and markets to price in a lasting geopolitical premium. The recent fall in traffic and rise in oil prices demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy.

Time, therefore, is not working in Washington’s favor. Each additional week of war increases operational costs, further depletes munitions stocks, fuels higher energy prices, and strengthens American public opposition to a prolonged conflict. Tehran is suffering far greater destruction, but its political threshold for tolerating losses is different. Iran’s leadership believes it can absorb levels of suffering that exceed what Donald Trump can politically withstand in the form of higher gasoline prices, military casualties, or electoral setbacks.

Sooner or later, Washington will probably have to return to the mediators who made the memorandum possible in the first place: Pakistan, Qatar, and Oman.

The Most Troubling Rupture Is Taking Place Within Iranian Society

The most enduring consequence of this war, however, may not be military. It concerns the changing way Iranian society views the United States and, more broadly, the West.

Before February 28, Iran was a regional outlier. A large share of its population rejected the regime’s official anti-American ideology.

The war that began on February 28 initially produced a classic rally-around-the-flag effect. Ali Khamenei’s week-long funeral ceremonies drew large crowds in Tehran and several other cities. These mobilizations demonstrated that, in the face of an external attack, the defense of national sovereignty outweighs opposition to the regime.

The current resumption of strikes could trigger a deeper shift. This is no longer merely a reflexive rally around the flag, but the consolidation of a belief: that the United States is not a party with which a durable agreement can be reached.

That belief rests on a chronology that has acquired considerable political force. Washington withdrew from the JCPOA after signing it. In June 2025, Israel and the United States attacked Iran while nuclear talks were underway. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel again initiated a war even though Omani mediation had produced genuine progress. Finally, less than a month after the Islamabad Memorandum was signed at the Palace of Versailles, U.S. strikes, the blockade, and sanctions resumed.

Each of these episodes has its own circumstances and its own distribution of responsibility. But their accumulation is producing a simple narrative in the Iranian collective consciousness: every diplomatic opening ultimately exposes Iran to another attack; every Western agreement is temporary; every concession becomes a vulnerability.

We do not yet have reliable polling that would allow us to conclude that anti-Americanism has become the majority view. But statements by academics, writers, journalists, and officials who previously favored dialogue point to a genuine transformation. This phenomenon is all the more significant because it no longer emanates solely from the institutions of the Islamic Republic. It is spreading through secular, regime-critical circles that have historically been open to the West.

The United States thus risks accomplishing what forty-seven years of official Iranian propaganda never fully achieved: uniting a growing share of society and the political establishment around the belief that America is structurally incapable of honoring an agreement.

The Perception of Double Standards

Distrust is no longer directed at Washington alone. It is extending to Europe.

The same questions recur in Iranian debate: Where are the defenders of children’s rights when a strike near a pediatric hospital forces cancer patients to interrupt their treatment, or when 168 children are killed by Tomahawk missiles in the bombing of their school in Minab? Where are environmental organizations when energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf is struck and suspected oil slicks appear around Iranian islands? Why does the destruction of a bridge, a power grid, or a railway line in Iran provoke less outrage than comparable events in Ukraine?

The comparison can be debated in its details, but its political force is undeniable.

The issue, therefore, is not merely what Europe says, but what it chooses to name, condemn, and sanction. International law loses its force when it appears to depend on the identity of the party violating it and that of those who suffer the consequences.

This perception will have lasting effects. Even if a pragmatic faction prevails in Tehran, it will now have to incorporate the view that an economic relationship with the West offers no strategic guarantee.

Europe Faces Its Moment of Truth

For Europe, the issue is first and foremost one of strategic credibility. It cannot claim to defend an order grounded in law while applying its principles selectively. It cannot denounce the destruction of civilian infrastructure when committed by an adversary and limit itself to abstract calls for restraint when the same acts are committed by an ally.

A credible European position would neither echo the Iranian narrative nor deny Tehran’s responsibility for attacks on merchant vessels. It would judge every act by the same standards: condemn both Iranian strikes against commercial shipping and the disproportionate expansion of the American campaign; demand the protection of civilians in Iran as in Ukraine; and defend freedom of navigation without granting Washington an unlimited right of military coercion.

France, more than most countries, possesses the historical and diplomatic resources to advance this position. The objective is not artificially to revive a Gaullist posture, but to recover its essence: independence of judgment, rejection of automatic alignments, nonselective respect for sovereignty, dialogue with all actors, and the primacy of the European interest.

Paris should call for an immediate halt to attacks on civilian infrastructure, support an international mission to assess humanitarian and environmental damage, and more firmly back the diplomatic initiatives of Pakistan, Qatar, and Oman.
Such autonomy would not amount to an anti-American policy. It would be the condition for preserving a mature transatlantic relationship-one in which alliance does not preclude disagreement and fidelity to the law takes precedence over bloc solidarity.

Europe must understand that its political credibility will also determine its future economic influence. A region that no longer perceives Europe as an independent actor will turn to other partners for its security, investment, technology, and reconstruction.

Is Trump’s America Still a Credible Partner?

Washington can destroy bridges, radars, ports, and command centers. It cannot alter the geography of the Strait of Hormuz or permanently eliminate Iran’s ability to control it without embarking on a ground war that it could sustain neither economically nor politically.

Negotiations will therefore return, but under conditions less favorable to Washington: an Iran vindicated in the effectiveness of its maritime leverage; a United States that will have failed to alter the balance of power and whose credibility as a signatory will be further damaged; more radicalized public opinion; and, finally, an even more marginalized Europe.

The gravest loss cannot be measured in missiles, ships, or billions of dollars. It lies in the collapse of trust. Destroyed infrastructure can be rebuilt. Railways and bridges can be repaired. It will be far more difficult to convince a new generation of Iranians that the West abides by the principles it proclaims and the agreements it signs.

Eric Lee / POOL / AFP
Marco Rubio, Bahrein, June 25th 2026