The rule in the memorandum was that Iran would use its best efforts to ensure the safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, at no charge, for sixty days.
The exception is the sentence that was not written. Nothing in the text said what happens on day sixty one, and nothing ruled out the levying of service fees after that. Tehran read the silence as a retained right. Washington read the clause as a description of how things would now be. Both readings are available from the words, which is the argument of this piece: the collapse announced yesterday was legible in the drafting from the day the drafting was published.
What the agreement was and was not
It is worth separating two things that have been run together since June. A ceasefire had been in place since 8 April. The memorandum of understanding announced on 14 June was not the ceasefire; it was an instrument intended to convert the ceasefire into a formal end to the conflict within sixty days.
That distinction matters because it tells you what the sixty days were for. They were a window in which the remaining questions were to be settled. The maritime clause was not a permanent settlement of who controls the strait. It was a standstill, and it said so, in the phrase no charge for sixty days only.
An instrument of that kind works if both parties want the window to close on an agreement. It fails in a specific way if either party treats the window as the agreement, because then the expiry of the window is not a deadline. It is a reversion.
Three tests
The claim is that the failure was in the drafting rather than in the events. There are three places to test that against the record.
The first is the timing of the first breach. Iran launched a drone strike against a vessel in the strait just over a week after the framework was signed. Not on day fifty nine, when a party manufacturing a pretext for expiry would act, and not in response to some later provocation. Early, while the ink was fresh. That is not the behavior of a state that believes it has conceded the point and is waiting for the clock. It is the behavior of a state that believes it retains an entitlement and is establishing that it does.
The second is the language of the Revolutionary Guards since. The formulation used has been that the strait remains closed until the United States ends its acts of aggression, which is a conditional framed entirely around American conduct. Nothing in it concedes that passage is owed. It treats passage as a thing Iran grants and can withdraw, which is precisely the reading that the clause permitted and did not foreclose.
The third is that both sides have continued to insist negotiations are alive. Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has said that ceasefire talks have not closed despite the renewed fighting. That is an odd thing to say if a settlement has been repudiated. It is an entirely coherent thing to say if the parties never agreed on what the June text meant, because then there is nothing to repudiate and the disagreement is where it always was.
Why the phrase was chosen
It would be easy to read best efforts as carelessness. It is not. It is a term of art, and in commercial drafting it does a known job: it lets a party accept an obligation whose performance it cannot fully control, and it lets the other party claim the obligation exists.
The trouble is that the job it does well in a supply contract is the job it does badly in a security arrangement. In commerce, a best efforts clause is enforceable in the sense that a court can later ask what a reasonable party would have done. There is no court here. There is no third party to whom the question of whether efforts were best can be put, and no mechanism that attaches a consequence to the answer.
Compare what the same problem looks like where it has been solved. Transit passage through international straits is governed by a body of law that does not depend on the goodwill of the coastal state, and its strength is that it makes passage a right rather than an accommodation. Egypt’s obligations at Suez were fixed by a convention in 1888 that removed the question from year to year politics for most of a century. Those arrangements are not perfect and they have been broken, but they establish a default that a party has to visibly violate rather than merely reinterpret.
A best efforts clause establishes no default. It creates a space in which two governments can each tell their own publics that they got what they wanted, and that is why such clauses get signed. They are not drafting failures. They are the price of an announcement.
There is a further reason such language survives the drafting room. The people negotiating a text are rarely the people who will have to live with its ambiguities, and the immediate reward for producing a signed document arrives on the day of the announcement, while the cost of the ambiguity arrives months later and is usually paid by someone else. That asymmetry is not unique to this agreement. It is close to universal in negotiated instruments, and it is why texts that nobody believes in still get signed.
The verdict
The record supports the narrow claim and not a wider one. The June instrument did not cause the return to fighting, and it is not the case that a better clause would have prevented it. States that want a war back can find their way to one through any text.
What the drafting did was remove the moment at which the disagreement would have had to be faced. A clause that said Iran shall ensure safe passage, full stop, would probably not have been signed on 14 June. Because it was not signed, the parties would have known on 14 June that they did not have an agreement, and the sixty days would have been spent on the actual question rather than on the appearance of having settled it.
Instead the announcement happened, the window opened, the first strike came inside ten days, and on 9 July, after American strikes answering Iranian attacks on commercial shipping, the ceasefire was declared over. Yesterday it was described as no longer in effect.
What has not changed in any of it is the thing the clause was drafted around. Nobody has yet said, in a document either government has signed, whether ships pass through that water as of right or by permission. Until somebody does, every arrangement built on top of the question will have the same fault line running under it, and each one will hold for about as long as the parties can avoid looking down.
