60 days after ceasefire agreement, fire has not ceased
By 
The paradox of the non-interventionist mindset:
Sixty days ago, seated beside French President Emmanuel Macron at a lavish dinner at the Palace of Versailles, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran and declared the beginning of the end of the U.S. conflict with Tehran.
The “historic breakthrough” would lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and ensure Iran never obtained a nuclear weapon, the White House declared. Trump advisers said the deal would demonstrate that the president could end, rather than prolong, the kind of “endless wars” in the Middle East he had spent years denouncing.
The agreement set aside two months for talks to turn the interim truce into something more ambitious: a broader settlement of the decades-long standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.
That window has now closed.
The war has not ended. The Strait of Hormuz remains largely shut. Detailed negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program never began.
The United States has resumed its blockade of Iranian ports. Tehran is demanding concessions that the Trump administration has rejected. And the administration has now publicly disowned several of the key points in the ill-fated memorandum, including development of a plan “with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and development” of Iran, a waiver of sanctions to allow Iran to sell oil, and a “dialogue” between Iran and Oman over how to run the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump on Monday went so far as to threaten to bomb Oman over its talks with Iran on management of the strait, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil used to pass.
If Oman “gets in the way,” Trump said in a Fox News interview, the U.S. would “bomb the s— out of them.” He demanded that Iran raise “the white flag of surrender” while insisting that neither the approaching midterm elections nor the passage of time was putting pressure on him to reach a deal.
This war both senseless and a political disaster for Trump. And even if marginal voters aren’t paying attention to foreign policy, they definitely pay attention to high gas prices, which are a major side effect of Trump’s folly. But he was told that he could easily attain objectives that he can’t attain, and he’s unwilling to end the war on the terms actually available. This is not the first time this dynamic has played out, but the impulsivity of the original decision to invade is very Trumpian.