The Peace That Lasted Eight Days
Published 4 October 2026
The memorandum was signed on 17 June. By 25 June a drone was reported hitting a merchant ship near the strait. The gap between those dates is eight days, and the whole argument about who broke the deal lives inside it.
A historian should say first what kind of evidence this is. Almost everything below comes from the US military's own press releases. They establish what CENTCOM said happened and what it did next. They do not independently prove who fired, and they do not settle whether anyone legally breached a memorandum whose text was never published as a treaty. Each claim is therefore attributed.
The first ship
CENTCOM said an Iranian drone hit the Singapore-flagged M/V Ever Lovely on 25 June while it was leaving Hormuz along Oman's coast, and that US strikes on 26 June targeted missile and drone storage and radar. ABC's timeline, written after the collapse, describes the US reading the maritime strike as a violation of the memorandum, and it also describes Iranian attacks on Bahrain and Kuwait that were intercepted.
Next, CENTCOM said a drone hit the Panama-flagged tanker M/T Kiku at 04:30 US Eastern time on 27 June. It was carrying more than two million barrels. The same release lists US strikes that day on surveillance, communications, air defence, drone storage and minelaying capabilities, and says commercial transits continued.
That last clause matters. The belligerent making the claim also says ships kept moving. Both things can be true: a strait can be dangerous and open at once, and an insurance desk can charge for the danger while a captain decides to go anyway.
A deal with a pulse
Nothing in these releases says the memorandum was formally cancelled. On 26 June, Israel and Lebanon announced a US-backed framework described as a first step toward peace. That was a separate track with its own history. Oil, for its part, was behaving as if the deal mattered: Brent's expiring August contract settled at $72.92 on 30 June, and Reuters reported Brent down about 21 percent in June after about 19 percent in May.
So the picture on the last day of June is odd and worth holding in the mind. Drones had hit two merchant ships and the US had struck Iranian military sites twice, yet the price of the world's marker crude had fallen by more than a fifth in a month. The market was pricing the memorandum, not the incidents.
Two dates that are not one date
On 7 July the US sanctions office revoked the oil licence it had issued under the memorandum, as the previous chapter set out. On 8 July the president said the deal was over. The IAEA's September report dates that remark to 8 July, which is why this file uses 8 July and not the 7 July that one Reuters retrospective gives. The revocation and the remark are separate events. The first is a legal notice. The second is a public statement, made a day later.
Count the days. From signing on 17 June to the first reported ship incident on 25 June is eight days. From signing to the president's remark is 21 days, inside a period the memorandum had set at a maximum of 60. The IAEA says that 60-day period expired on 17 August. So one party declared the memorandum over on day 21 of a clock that kept running for another 40 days, and the next chapter takes up what happened to it in between.
Oil registered the change at once. Brent's 31 July settlement of $90.12 was up 24 percent for the month of July, after falling more than a fifth in June. The market that had priced a deal in June was pricing its absence by July.
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