A Bad Deal
By 
This is why you don’t send amateurs to negotiate with professionals:
Critics say that Mr. Trump conceded this new status quo in the June agreement with Tehran. At the insistence of Iranian negotiators, that 14-point document acknowledges Iran’s power in the strait.
It prohibits the charging of tolls or fees, but only for 60 days while negotiations toward another agreement continues. (Mr. Trump has said the United States could try to charge tolls.) The memorandum also does not include an ironclad guarantee that ships can safely sail any portion of the strait.
Iranian officials and diplomatic experts say the final line formally ceded to Iran a central role in managing the strait: “The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz, in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states, in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.”
At the time, Mr. Trump praised the agreement as a return to free navigation through the strait. But Iranian officials were soon citing it as grounds for dictating where ships should sail — namely, along a route near Iran’s coastline.
When two countries go to war, there are usually a series of disputes that they are seeking to resolve through force. Making peace requires either acknowledging that those issues have been resolved by force, or acknowledging that they cannot be resolved through force at reasonable expense. A peace agreement attempts to secure this acknowledgement without creating additional flashpoints for conflict and giving spoilers on either side the opportunity to spoil.
The MOU was bad from the start in large part because it failed in these last two tasks. On the first, it created several flashpoints for conflict (the strait, the sanctions regime, the reparations fund, the nuclear negotiations) by failing to clarify responsibilities on either side or mechanisms for dispute resolution. This has placed both sides in a quandary, because even if they no longer want to fight to accomplish the original goals of the war, they feel they need to fight in order to contest the parameters of the agreement. With respect to spoilers we still haven’t seen how bad things can get, largely I think because the Israelis are waiting to see if the deal collapses under the weight of accumulated violent transgressions.
Saying these things out loud should not have inaugurated a host of “don’t attack the deal from the hawkish right!” takes, but these criticisms missed the point entirely. The MOU was badly negotiated in ways that professional diplomats immediately recognized as undermining its stability and making a return to conflict exceedingly likely. And that’s now the world we’re living in.