President Donald Trump said on July 10 that the United States has agreed to continue negotiations with Iran but that the ceasefire between the countries is over.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has asked us to continue ‘talks.’ We have agreed to do so, but the United States has stated to them, in no uncertain terms, that the ceasefire is OVER!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network.
The White House signaled a day earlier, following another round of clashes with Iran, that it was prepared to honor the terms of the memorandum of understanding it signed with the Islamic Republic last month—provided Tehran does the same.
However, right after Trump’s remarks, the U.S. imposed fresh sanctions against Iran, targeting a an alleged financier for Supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei and 13 other individuals and entities,
The sanctions target Ali Ansari, an Iranian banker and businessman based in Dubai who had previously been sanctioned by Britain, allegedly for financially supporting the activities of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and other entities.
The Treasury said Ansari had diverted publicly funded wealth into an extensive overseas portfolio of real estate and commercial holdings to enrich himself, government elites, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also targeted key Iranian exchange houses and foreign “front companies” that it says moved billions of dollars annually on behalf of sanctioned Iranian banks, using layers of shell companies to obscure the government’s illicit activity.
Announcing the sanctions, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department would “continue using every tool at its disposal” to isolate Khamenei and other top Iranian officials from the global financial system.
The sanctions marked yet another major violation by the U.S. of the memorandum of understanding. Washington had committed not to impose any additional sanctions on the Islamic Republic during the 60-day talks period set by the deal.
Amid this escalation, Reuters reported, citing senior U.S. officials, that the U.S. is demanding Iran publicly state it will halt attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz and that all lanes in the strait remain open to shipping with no tolls.
“What we’re demanding is that the Iranians issue a public statement that acknowledges all channels of the Strait of Hormuz are open and they’re not shooting at ships anymore. They’re either going to give us that statement or we’re not having a good outcome for them,” one official said.
Iran has told Washington that recent attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which triggered the clashes, stemmed from “an errant part of their system,” according to the official.
A power struggle appears to be unfolding in real time between hardliners in Iran and pragmatists, an official told Reuters.
“We are hoping to get to a place where they publicly say that they will stop shooting at ships and sort of explicitly or at least implicitly acknowledging that they screwed up. We are working on that now,” one official said.
All in all, the memorandum of understanding appears to be slowly but surely collapsing. So far, the U.S. has violated the deal in nearly every conceivable way — threatening Iran, launching strikes against the Islamic Republic, deploying additional forces to the Middle East, restoring old sanctions, and, more recently, imposing new ones.
That said, the deal’s collapse won’t necessarily mean a return to full-blown war. The U.S. and Iran could instead remain locked in a prolonged, low-intensity conflict marked by regular, limited clashes — a scenario that would likely keep the Strait of Hormuz closed for the foreseeable future.
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