TEHRAN – In an exclusive interview with the Tehran Times, Silvia Boltuc, an Italian geopolitical analyst and Managing Director of Special Eurasia, examines the collapse of the US-Iran memorandum after Washington’s July strikes.
She argues the rupture reflects coercive bargaining, not a scripted plot, tracing how ambiguity over Hormuz, shifting rhetoric on Iran’s enriched uranium, NATO’s fractured Ankara summit, and (Persian) Gulf states’ exposure have shaped the crisis. Boltuc also explains why the Strait of Hormuz remains Iran’s most valuable, double-edged card.
Below is the full text of the interview:
Trump declared the ceasefire “over” just hours after US strikes hit Iranian territory. Does this sequence suggest Washington was looking for a pretext to abandon the memorandum of understanding?
The open-source record doesn’t allow to establish the intent with certainty, but it allows to establish a pattern. There is some evidence consistent with the “pretext” reading.
The precipitating incident (Iran’s tanker strikes) occurred at the single most legally ambiguous point in the MoU: the document required reopening Hormuz but did not explicitly resolve who controls passage through the Strait, leaving both sides free to claim the other broke the deal first. An agreement with a known, unresolved trigger point is structurally fragile, and a party looking for an off-ramp doesn’t need to manufacture a crisis if one is built into the text.
Trump’s own language (“waste of time”, “garbage”, “sick people”, “I don’t want to deal with them anymore”) reads not as someone reluctantly forced to abandon the deal, but as someone who wants to prove the US power and force Tehran to understand that it is better to negotiate than to escalate militarily.
A US official told medias Trump’s decision was shaped in part by personal irritation that Iran struck ships while he was on the world stage at NATO, therefore pointing at a status/optics grievance, not solely a security calculus, in line with the US President character. It further added that Trump was losing patience with the pace of negotiations, specifically Tehran’s perceived slow-walking on the nuclear talks, suggesting frustration predated the tanker incident.
Tehran’s own negotiators framed the strikes as enforcement of its claimed jurisdiction over the Strait, which is itself a deliberate pressure tactic, not a passive trigger.
According to a US source, Washington calibrated its response, striking and then pausing to avoid escalation and let diplomacy work, maintaining a target list as leverage rather than exhausting it, which is inconsistent with a side that simply wanted the deal dead.
Trump explicitly kept the door open to talks even while declaring the ceasefire over, behaviour more consistent with coercive bargaining than with a deliberate rupture. The sequence is best read not as a fabricated pretext to kill the MoU outright, but as coercive escalation exploiting a real ambiguity Washington may have anticipated would eventually be tested.
The Hormuz control question was left unresolved in the MoU for a reason, probably because neither side could get the other to concede it at signing, and whoever tested that ambiguity first (which Iran did) would hand the other side a “we didn’t break it, you did” argument. That dynamic benefits Washington’s negotiating leverage regardless of whether it was engineered, and Trump’s team has visibly used the “ceasefire is over” declaration as a pressure lever rather than a final word, given talks continued within 48 hours.
Tehran should treat the rhetorical “it’s over” as negotiating theatre layered on top of a genuine military escalation, not as evidence of a scripted plot, but also not as an accident. The practical risk for Iranian decision-makers is the same either way: any further Hormuz-related move gives Washington a ready-made justification for further strikes, with US domestic critics and international law objections (civilian infrastructure targeting) providing only marginal constraints.
Washington insists Iran can never have a nuclear weapon, but Trump has now said the US isn’t pressing to collect Iran’s enriched uranium as the June agreement specified. What does abandoning this provision suggest about how seriously Washington ever intended to honour the deal?
The June 17–18 MOU (Article 8) never actually specified that Washington would collect Iran’s enriched uranium. The clause commits both sides to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material through a mechanism to be mutually agreed, with the minimum methodology being on-site down-blending under IAEA supervision. That means the baseline the two governments actually signed was dilution of the material inside Iran, not confiscation or removal to US custody, a shift from Washington’s earlier demand that Iran hand the stockpile over. So, there’s no MOU provision to abandon in the literal sense. What’s moved is Trump’s personal rhetoric, which is a different and more revealing story.
Between February–May, Trump repeatedly framed uranium confiscation/destruction as the central war aim. In early May, he told reporters Iran must hand over the material even if it had become unusable. By early June, at the White House, he said the US doesn’t need a deal at all to get it, as Washington is monitoring the sites from space and will act against anyone approaching them, but adds Washington won’t rush the extraction because it’s buried, and that he had considered sending US troops to retrieve the buried stockpile at the war’s start but chose not to over the risk of being like Jimmy Carter (an explicit hostage-rescue-failure analogy).
On 17 June (G7, the same day the MOU was finalised), Trump tells reporters there’s no rush to retrieve the uranium, calling it something the US wants “psychologically” but not urgently, and suggesting it may not even be worth the effort. Washington considers that the bombing campaign (Midnight Hammer) had already buried it effectively.
Based on these considerations, a pattern emerges. The nuclear rationale was always more elastic than the war rhetoric implied. Trump swung from “we will get the uranium, deal or no deal” to “it’s not valuable, why bother” within about six weeks, without any new technical finding to justify the shift (nothing changed about the material itself between April and June). That volatility indicates the uranium-extraction objective functioned as a mobilising narrative for the war and for allied/domestic audiences, not as a fixed operational requirement Washington was structurally committed to executing. Tehran should not assume any of US nuclear red line reflects a stable technical threshold; it reflects whatever framing is politically useful to the White House at a given moment. That is exactly the same volatility visible in the ceasefire-collapse sequence covered previously.
Nevertheless, this is not a full renunciation, it’s a downgrade from active enforcement to passive deterrence. Washington isn’t saying it no longer cares; it’s saying it will rely on surveillance and the threat of force. That’s materially significant for Iran: it lowers the odds Washington pushes hard in the 60-day/final-deal window for a verified, inspected down-blending process, but it also means the material’s status remains a live pretext Washington can invoke at will, as already happened when US strikes hit the perimeter of the Bushehr nuclear plant during the Hormuz crisis, unrelated to enrichment at all.
The US President’s declarations are clearly part of a strategic communication strategy targeting his domestic electorate, international allies, and Tehran. The core concern, however, is the current lack of a third-party or international guarantor willing or able to ensure Washington will not violate or abandon the new agreement, as occurred with the JCPOA.
Do you see Israel as a driving force behind Washington’s decision to abandon the memorandum of understanding, given the pattern of escalation on multiple fronts simultaneously?
We have two parallel tracks here: the Lebanon front, where Israeli obstruction is well-documented and repeatedly attributed, including by a US official, and the specific 7–10 July episode in the Strait. Conversely, evidence regarding the specific 7–10 July episode in the Strait is materially weaker; however, a lack of definitive proof does not inherently rule out Israeli involvement.
Specifically, a Jerusalem Post report from this week states Israel was not expected to join this round of fighting between the US and Iran, and both a US official and Israeli officials denied any Israeli involvement in that specific strike.
Moreover, the precipitating event, Iran’s attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, was about Iran’s jurisdictional claim over the Strait, a dispute between Washington and Tehran directly, with no Israeli fingerprint reported by any open source.
On the other side, there has been a Trump-Netanyahu phone call on 9 July, after the second wave of US strikes, in which the two “agreed to continue coordination… on the various fronts”, consistent with routine alliance management.
This episode appears to be a genuine US-Iran bilateral dispute stemming from an unresolved ambiguity within the MOU, further exacerbated by Trump’s irritation at being upstaged during the NATO summit, aligning with the assessment in my initial response. Nevertheless, several key nuances still warrant closer examination.
Tehran’s own negotiators have explicitly and repeatedly tied the survival of the Hormuz/nuclear track to Israeli behaviour in Lebanon: Ghalibaf and Araghchi have both said, in different words, that Washington must choose between the ceasefire and continuing the war through Israel. That means Tehran itself has built a linkage where Israeli obstruction on one front can be used to justify Iranian escalation on the other (as happened multiple times with Hormuz closures explicitly cited as a response to Israeli Lebanon strikes). That’s a real point of leverage for Iran, but it’s double-edged: it also means any future ambiguous incident (like the Bushehr strike where attribution was contested) will be read by Tehran through an Israel-sabotage lens whether or not Israel was actually involved, which raises the risk of Iran responding to a US action as if it were an Israeli one, or vice versa.
Furthermore, a pivotal question concerns the extent of Israel’s leverage over the foreign policy objectives of the Trump administration. It is evident that domestic interest groups and lobbying networks within the United States exert substantial pressure on Washington to adopt a hawkish posture regarding Iran. Nevertheless, despite aligning with the Netanyahu administration during the February military engagements, the current executive has been notably audacious compared to preceding administrations in its public criticism of Israeli policies, explicitly seeking to constrain Tel Aviv’s aggressive regional posture.
Should the Trump administration secure a landmark diplomatic achievement by concluding a formal agreement with Tehran, thereby realising the geo-economic and commercial objectives that define its transactional, business-oriented approach to governance, Israeli geopolitical leverage would inevitably be marginalised. Concurrently, however, in the absence of such a definitive diplomatic breakthrough, Israel retains a critical window of strategic manoeuvrability to disrupt or derail the negotiation process.
NATO’s summit declaration backed Washington’s position and called the US strikes “necessary.” What does NATO involvement in this rhetoric signal about the alliance’s willingness to be drawn into a Middle East confrontation beyond its traditional mandate?
The formal Ankara Summit Declaration does not call the US strikes necessary. Its entire Iran-related content is one sentence: allies reiterate that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon and call on Iran to fully respect freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. No reference to the strikes, no endorsement of military action, no departure from NATO’s decades-old non-proliferation position on Iran.
The phrase “absolutely necessary” came from Secretary General Mark Rutte personally in press remarks before the summit and in a private meeting with Trump.
NATO was actually not being asked to take on a Middle East military role. A US source confirmed that the US administration did not propose to the allies a direct Atlantic mission in the Strait of Hormuz but pushed for Iranian behaviour there to be folded into the alliance’s energy-security assessments, i.e., Washington sought a rhetorical categorisation (labelling Iran’s conduct as market-destabilising “blackmail”), not an operational tasking or Article 5-adjacent mandate. That’s a deliberate, narrow ask, consistent with knowing a broader request would fracture the room.
And the room was, in fact, fractured. Trump’s own public frustration is the clearest evidence NATO did not rally behind him: he told reporters ahead of a main session that members “didn’t want to help with the number one state sponsor of terror, Iran”. Specific, named defections: Spain did not authorise the US to use its bases for operations against Iran, while UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer repeatedly said the UK would not get pulled into the war. Germany’s chancellor separately said Berlin sees no need for an international military operation to protect Hormuz shipping and does not want to be part of the campaign against Iran. Even inside the closed-door session, a source told media outlets Trump’s private comments on Iran were noticeably milder than his public rhetoric, suggesting the room pushed back even on him. The only concrete operational offer came bilaterally from the host, Turkey, which pledged mine-clearing support in Hormuz, a national contribution tied to Ankara’s own regional ambitions, not an alliance tasking.
Therefore, NATO as a treaty organisation is not being drawn into a Middle East confrontation. There is no Article 5 basis for it (Iran hasn’t attacked NATO territory) and the consensus text changed nothing about NATO’s existing Iran policy.
What we are actually watching is transactional alliance management: Rutte, whose central job this summit was to keep Trump’s grievances (Greenland, defence spending, “allies didn’t help us”) from blowing up the alliance’s real priorities (European defence spending, the €70 billion Ukraine package, Article 5 reaffirmation) bought goodwill with a costless rhetorical endorsement of a strike Washington had already carried out unilaterally. That’s a personal political favour to Trump, not a mandate expansion, and several of the alliance’s most consequential members (Germany, Spain, UK) publicly declined to be associated with it.
The channel actually worth watching is not NATO’s communiqué language but individual member states’ bilateral choices (basing access, arms transfers, mine-clearing offers) since that’s where real operational risk to Iran would materialise, and on that front the picture this week is one of reluctance, not mobilisation.
Persian Gulf states hosting US forces were drawn into this round of strikes. How exposed are these countries by continuing to host American bases amid an unresolved conflict with Iran? propria deterrenza basata sulla propria forza militare interna.
Washington operates at least 19 permanent and temporary military sites across West Asia and the southern Gulf, with 8 permanent bases specifically in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. That breadth means (Persian) Gulf exposure isn’t incidental to this crisis, it’s baked into the region’s basing architecture and will recur with every future round of US-Iran escalation, not just this one.
(Persian) Gulf states spent decades positioning themselves as indispensable security partners of the US, and in (Persian) Gulf capitals as decoration of protection and status. In exchange, they received military protection but exposed themselves to harm, and once conflict with Iran intensified, their bases became immediate strategic targets, national sovereignty became conditional, and effective neutrality became impossible. Hosting a foreign military presence, in fact, does not shield a society from war, it embeds that society inside the war’s structure.
US bases in the (Persian) Gulf have shifted from being a symbol of protection to a cause of targeting, shattering decades of built-up security illusions and pulling states that were used to watching wars in Yemen, Syria and Gaza from a distance suddenly inside the missile and drone engagement zone. Opting to close these installations would not only expose host nations to severe US economic countermeasures, but would also compel them to rely entirely on their domestic military capabilities for deterrence, an existential challenge given their current strategic limitations.
They are also being squeezed by Washington, not only threatened by Tehran. Trump has reportedly threatened Oman that any cooperation with Iran on managing Hormuz navigation would expose it to military punishment severe enough to “destroy it”, and has demanded Arab states normalise relations with Israel as a condition tied to ending the Iran war, a demand reflecting Washington’s estrangement from and contempt for its own allies, and the decline of traditional diplomacy in favour of decisions concentrated in the President and a small circle of relatives and advisers.
Read together with the fact that the June MOU doesn’t explicitly address Iran’s missile and drone program (the actual source of Persian Gulf states’ primary threat perception) the picture for (Persian) Gulf capitals is genuinely uncomfortable on both sides: struck by Iran when Washington escalates and coerced by Washington on unrelated files (Oman/Hormuz management, Israel normalisation) as the price of the relationship.
Clearly, Iran is accumulating real reputational cost in the Arab world with every round, even among states not directly aligned with Washington’s campaign. These states see Iranian strikes on their territory as attacks on their sovereignty and territorial integrity and see themselves as having been dragged into a war against their will, a formulation that generates sympathy for (Persian) Gulf capitals, not for Tehran, in the wider Arab public conversation, regardless of who technically started this round.
In conclusion, Iran has real coercive leverage, but it is leverage with a rising political price tag, since regional condemnation is accumulating. The more productive lever, and the one Qatar’s active mediation role this week already demonstrates being used, is pushing Gulf frustration toward diplomatic pressure on Washington to honour the MOU and de-escalate.
Given your work on Iran’s energy strategy, how significant is control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran’s broader position in this confrontation?
Hormuz is real, first-order leverage, and probably Iran’s single most valuable asset in this confrontation. Iran’s own military has said explicitly it isn’t chasing toll revenue but retaining the strait as a strategic deterrence against Washington, and analysts across very different traditions converge on why that works: Iran doesn’t need military parity with the US to shape outcomes, merely raising perceived shipping risk through a fifth of the world’s oil and roughly a fifth of its LNG trade is enough to move global prices, rattle markets, and create real political cost for Trump ahead of the midterms. That’s a genuine asymmetric equaliser no other card in Iran’s hand comes close to matching.
But calibration is the key. Is about who it ends up pressuring and who it ends up alienating. Every time the strait is disrupted, the pain doesn’t land only on Washington or the (Persian) Gulf hosts, it lands hardest on Iran’s own strategic partner. China is Iran’s largest oil customer and its third-largest overall supplier; a large share of China’s seaborne crude runs through Hormuz. Chinese commentary has been unusually blunt about this at home: financial press in Beijing describes unilateral strait control as a move that injures the wielder as much as the target, since Iran’s own economy is more dependent on the strait than any rivals, while China simultaneously has to scramble reserves and alternative routes to cover the gap. Squeezing Hormuz repeatedly risks souring the relationship with the one major power that has used its Security Council veto to shield Iran diplomatically.
Europe gets hit too. In principle, that price pain gives Brussels a reason to lean on Trump for de-escalation. In practice, Europe will not push hard as European capitals need Washington’s continued commitment to NATO and are simultaneously asking the US for support on Ukraine funding, which makes them reluctant to spend political capital confronting Trump over Iran specifically.
Moreover, every disruption accelerates the exact bypass infrastructure that erodes Hormuz’s value permanently. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are expanding pipelines that already proved critical during closures; Iraq has reopened its pipeline to Turkey and is reviving others to Jordan and Egypt. On the European side, Von der Leyen has explicitly called for bypass corridors, and Turkey’s energy minister is actively pitching Ankara as the alternative hub to bring Turkmen gas via Azerbaijan and Georgia into Turkey and on to Europe, part of the broader Middle Corridor that Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are also racing to capitalise on. The clear beneficiary of that realignment is Ankara, not Tehran: a Turkish-anchored corridor structurally increases Turkey’s regional weight while routing around Iran entirely.
The bottom line is that Hormuz remains Iran’s best card and should be used, but every play of it should be weighed against three audiences, not one: it pressures Washington, but it also punishes Beijing and nudges Europe toward Ankara. Overplaying it doesn’t just carry a slow-burn economic cost to Iran itself; it actively builds the infrastructure and coalition (Persian Gulf pipelines plus a Turkish-led Middle Corridor) that permanently dilutes the leverage and elevates a regional rival in the process.
Pakistan brokered the original ceasefire framework, and Persian Gulf states have signalled a renewed diplomatic push. Who do you see as best positioned to mediate now, given Washington’s apparent unwillingness to continue serious talks?
Pakistan and Qatar are functioning as a coordinated pair, and both were active again within 24 hours of the ceasefire’s collapse. Regional sources confirmed they are both working to bring the US and Iran back to the table, even as the second wave of strikes was still underway on 9 July. A Qatari political delegation, headed by an adviser to the Qatari prime minister, arrived on 10 July directly in Mashhad, where FM Araghchi held talks with them specifically to keep the diplomatic track alive after the Hormuz strikes.
Qatar brings institutional mediation experience, it co-led the Gaza ceasefire talks with Egypt, and Doha had already been a channel for earlier US-Iran contacts before the war, resuming that role by mid-May once Iran’s initial strikes on (Persian) Gulf states paused and both Washington and Tehran separately asked Doha to help break the deadlock. Pakistan’s role is more unusual and more load-bearing: it isn’t a traditional high-level diplomatic broker for a file this complex, but it shares a land border with Iran, maintains good relations with both capitals, is a nuclear power and, critically, Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir has a direct personal channel to Trump.
According to open-sources, technical talks with Tehran are continuing alongside a broader coalition of mediator states (Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) all working to prevent the understandings from collapsing entirely.
Oman remains institutionally relevant (it’s traditionally the most trusted US-Iran back-channel going back to the original nuclear talks, and it’s co-chairing the Oman-Iran joint committee on Hormuz management arrangements) but has shown friction with Tehran specifically as Muscat publicly opposed Iran’s transit-fee plan on international-law grounds, which somewhat complicates its neutrality from Iran’s perspective right now. Turkey has offered concrete help and Erdoğan has been vocal, but as covered in the Israel-obstruction assessment, his own sharp public criticism of Israel likely reduces his credibility as a neutral broker in Washington’s eyes.
China and Russia should be understood and used as what they actually are right now: indispensable insurance at the Security Council against Iran’s position being delegitimized or a use-of-force resolution being passed against it, not a substitute negotiating channel.
Most importantly, even the best-positioned mediator can only create the opportunity, but the underlying obstacle remains Trump’s own political calculus, which no outside party fully controls.
Trump said negotiators could keep talking even as he called the ceasefire “over.” Is there a realistic path back to serious diplomacy, or has trust broken down beyond repair at this stage?
FM Araghchi, in an on-record interview with the Financial Times, told the paper directly that US officials must explain clearly why they attacked Iran in the middle of the previous round of negotiations, and must give firm guarantees this will never happen again in future talks, adding that Tehran will not settle for words and promises, and needs real actions to build confidence. This explains the first real obstacle to resume talks, which is the lack of mutual trust. But trust was never the operative currency in this process to begin with, so to say that it has broken down beyond repair may be the wrong frame.
A secondary impediment is the absence of direct and effective communication channels between both parties, compounded by a substantial divergence in their core strategic demands.
Finally, domestic political constraints further restrict the diplomatic space. Hardliners within Iran routinely characterise engagement with Washington as an act of treason. Concurrently, the Trump administration must carefully calibrate its rhetoric to rebuild fractured domestic consensus and project US power, particularly as strategic analysts view the recent US-Israeli military operation as a tactical debacle.
In conclusion, the diplomatic window remains open, but turning the current ceasefire into a real political process requires more effective direct communication, confidence-building diplomacy, a clear timeline, and willingness to trade concessions, none of which currently exist in mature form. Unfortunately, the operating model is likely to remain mediated, indirect, and transactional, rather than developing into direct, high-trust dialogue.
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