The Daily - Why the Cease-Fire With Iran Keeps Crumbling

0:01From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. On Monday, the U.S. and Iran exchanged attacks and increasingly fiery rhetoric for the third day in a row, leaving both sides on the verge of a full-blown return to the war. Today, my colleague David Sanger explains what brought us to this point and what this new phase tells us about how difficult it will be for the war to end. It's Tuesday, July 14. David Sanger, welcome back to the Daily. Good to be with you, Rachel. David, the last time we had you on the show, Iran and the United States had just reached what felt like at the time to be quite a shaky ceasefire. We knew that the agreement had been pretty rushed. And since then, it feels like everything has basically just fallen apart. The US just announced a blockade of Iranian ports that's going into effect Tuesday afternoon. And so I guess my first question is, is

1:12the agreement that we last talked to you about, even still in effect. There's not much of it left. We all suspected, Rachel, that this agreement had the seeds of its own destruction built in. But I think even the most cynical about how the Iranians and the Americans would interpret it differently did not expect it to fall apart quite as quickly as it did.

1:38And I think if you're trying to figure out why that's happened, it basically lies in the fact that it was so hastily pieced together. It was so hastily announced when Vice President Vance was sent over to sign a document. He wouldn't even shake hands with the Iranians and they wouldn't shake hands with him. It was bound to fail. Right. You had basically told us, I think, that this agreement essentially kicked the can down the road on a lot of kind of really big important issues between the United States and Iran that both sides needed to hash out. That's right, Rachel. And we were all pretty focused at the time on what needed to be accomplished in this 60-day-long negotiation. The first issue, of course, was the nuclear program on which the 14-point statement only said that Iran would blend down its nuclear material, essentially dilute it so that it couldn't be used for weapons.

2:37But it left unclear who was going to ultimately have possession of that nuclear material or whether there would be negotiations to limit Iran's missile program or whether there would be any language in a permanent agreement that would benefit the protesters who have taken to the streets. But while we were looking at all of that, Rachel, the second matter is we never even got to that negotiation. There were some brief discussions, but.

3:06what overwhelmed the entire thing was poor wording on the question of what it even meant to open the Strait of Hormuz. I want to talk about that poor wording for a second. What specifically did both sides agree to vis-a-vis the Strait? Well, Rachel, the controversy really focuses on the meaning of the fifth paragraph of this very short agreement. You want to read us? Yeah, I'll just read it to you. It says, Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. It's a single sentence, seems pretty clear, but there are some wiggle words in it. It's best efforts for safe passage. And the interpretation that the American side was pushing

4:01was that this commits the Iranians to opening up the narrow Strait of Hormuz, which has three different channels, one near Iran, one in the middle of the Strait, one closer to Oman, and that traffic would essentially be restored to what it was before the war started on February 28th. But the fact of the matter is, Rachel, that never happened. The Iranians immediately said, yes, we'll reopen the Strait.

4:28But we're only going to open up one channel. It's the channel closest to Iran, the one that takes you through Iranian territorial waters. And can you just explain, David, these three channels, why are they only suggesting that that one should be open? Because that channel is the one that's closest in their control. It's within their territorial waters. They patrol it with their own ships. And ultimately, if that's the only channel open, It's the one they plan to go charge a toll or some kind of service fee for if you want to get through the Strait of Hormuz. So is this basically coming down to two different interpretations about what it means for the Strait to be open? The United States thinks the Strait is the Strait. It's all open and the Iranians are saying, well, actually there's three channels and we can just choose to open one of them. Well, that's right. And I asked some administration officials who were briefing us on Friday,

5:24Was this just a difference of interpretation? One of the very senior people who was involved in this said, no, no, no. The Iranians understood from the beginning that the open straight meant it was entirely open. The Iranian explanation is, no, there's nothing in that language that says we had to fully open it. It just said we had to make our best effort to make sure there was safe passage and the safest way to take your cargo in and out.

5:51is right along the Iranian coast. This is why contract attorneys hammer out every single word of a contract so that there is not wording that is open to such ambiguity that can be exploited. It's also why very experienced diplomats, especially diplomats who have dealt with Iran in the past, make sure that the wording of international agreements is as bulletproof as a contract would be. But in this case, We don't have people who have negotiated with Iran before on this kind of issue involved in the talks. The president quite deliberately put this in the hands of his vice president, JD Vance, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his chief envoy, Steve Witkoff. They've negotiated deals, particularly Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff, in the past real estate deals largely, but they weren't involved in the

6:43Obama-era negotiations that the Trump administration has so denounced, if they had checked with a couple of those diplomats, I think they probably would have been warned that this wording left huge loopholes. Nothing necessarily matters, David, but from your perspective, is one side's interpretation of this paragraph five language clearly correct or incorrect? Look, I think if you came to this...

7:08completely as a blank slate and you read the words that were in front of you, you would immediately think the entire straight was open. But the Iranians are known for reinterpreting this kind of thing. They do it with nuclear inspections and where the inspectors can go. We've seen them do this in a range of other areas. So it really was no surprise when you saw wording like best efforts, and no definition of what it meant to open the straight that there was probably going to be trouble here. Right. You're basically saying this is quite predictable because Iranians are known for perhaps in the perspective of the United States operating in bad faith. Let me put it this way. When the document was first published in mid-June, I ran the wording by

8:02people who have negotiated nuclear records and other records with Iran in the past and it was the first thing they flagged to me as potential trouble. And it seems like they were right, right? It seems like trouble has quite clearly borne out. Oh, yeah, they were a hundred percent right. But you know what really strikes me, Rachel, in this is thinking about the way the Trump administration was discussing this agreement with Iran.

8:32just three weeks ago. At the time, JD Vance, on his way to Switzerland, to sign this agreement, said something pretty interesting. He said, the coolest thing about the progress we've made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, say, you know what? We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we've done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let's try something else.

9:01So the essence of JD Vance's argument was that in these negotiations they had not only won out in the wording they had actually converted the Iranian leadership over to believing that we're in new territory here and we're gonna put all of the disputes of the past aside and strike a deal that'll be profitable for Iran and will of course bring down prices for Americans.

9:35And that didn't take that long for that to fall apart. In fact, it was only last week as the shooting was starting again in the straight that President Trump called those same leaders scum and said, they're sick people, they're led by sick people, and they're vicious, violent people. And as far as I'm concerned, it's just a waste of time dealing with them. And I believe he also said at the time that as far as he was concerned, the ceasefire was off.

10:04He did he said it's over, but the negotiations could keep going on Now I don't know how you do those two parts because the ceasefire was essentially one of the legs of the stool that kept everything together while they did this bigger negotiation and today that legs been kicked out and if anything Rachel We are now as far apart as we were before the memorandum of understanding was signed. Because we're back to a blockade of all traffic going in and out of Iranian ports. In other words, an effort to try to starve out the Iranians by cutting off their oil revenue. We're back to a position where the US Navy is stuck in the strait and there's active fire.

10:59And while we're not bombing the entire country the way the US was in March and the beginning of April, we are back to a period of on and off hostility, neither war nor peace, but certainly a situation that the President will find very difficult to extricate himself from. We'll be right back.

11:42So, David, you just said that the United States is essentially stuck in kind of a quagmire right now. Where do both sides stand just in terms of negotiating? Like, are they even trying to negotiate any kind of agreement? Well, this has never really been a true negotiation where you sit down at the table and have a back and forth. And, you know, for all of the critiques of the Obama era deal.

12:05At least at that time, the chief negotiator for the United States, Wendy Sherman, sat down opposite Kirk counterpart in the Iranian leadership. And the secretary of state at the time, John Kerry, sat down opposite Javid Zarif, who was the Iranian foreign minister at the time. And they hashed things out. And sometimes when it got too heated, they took a walk around downtown Vienna.

12:31That's not what's going on here. What's going on here is messages being passed through the Qataris or through the Pakistanis. It's a pretty stilted process. And they haven't really gotten to even the first steps of writing a comprehensive nuclear agreement. And it's very hard for me to imagine Rachel right now with the two sides actively shooting at each other.

13:00The ceasefire declared off a blockade back on the Iranian ports that you could even start that process up again. Right. And to the extent that they are talking now, it's really just about free passage in the straight and maybe even getting back to a ceasefire. But all of those basics, the sort of fundamentals you need in order to start a conversation, that's what's collapsed here.

13:30Basically, what you're saying is that they cannot even begin to negotiate on some of these really complicated intractable problems until they get the straight open, which just to remind everybody was open before this war started. That's right. It was wide open. It was wide open during the 1979 revolution. It was wide open during the Iran-Iraq War. It was wide open during our nuclear crises. And now, of course, it's sucking up.

13:58all the oxygen in the negotiating room. It feels David like the administration has sort of been treating the straight as if it's like the easiest problem to solve compared to all these other issues that you've described. But what it sounds like has been revealed to us is that the straight is kind of an issue that's just as intractable as the others. Do you think that's fair? It is because the Iranians have discovered that it was a lot easier to close down the straight.

14:26And the weapon was a lot more powerful than they had imagined. And so now they have no interest in giving it up. Look, they only have two forms of leverage against the United States. One is the ability to build a nuclear weapon on fairly short notice. And that's not really available to them now. It hasn't been for a year since the US attacked the three major nuclear sites at Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan.

14:56The second piece of leverage they have is the ability to cause havoc in the world economy and world energy markets. Now, Rachel, that is not necessarily a lasting power for the Iranians. You're already seeing countries figure out how to get energy elsewhere. Over time, you're going to see more pipelines built to avoid having to send oil across the strait. The Saudis have already reactivated unused pipeline they had to route around the strait. So the Iranians know that this is not going to be a forever weapon, but it's pretty good for right now. If that power is, as you described, just kind of short-term, what is the value in deploying it? Like, what is the end game? Well, I'm not sure that they've got a long-term end game here, but the value of deploying it right now is they are showing that they can invoke

15:54as much pain on the United States as the US can invoke on Iran by resuming military action. And what we've learned over the past few months is that the Iranians have a two step play every time things get rough with the United States again. Step one is try to shut down the straight. And step two is direct missiles or drones at US bases in the Arab world that they can strike because they're relatively nearby. What they're doing is sending a message that they can still target their Arab neighbors, that there's a price for hosting the United States. As one former official put it to me, for years the Iranians sort of kept a blind eye to the fact that the US was keeping all these bases in the Arab world, and now they're outright attacking them.

16:52It feels David like what you're saying is that Iran's main goal here is simply to demonstrate to the United States that hey watch it because we can actually really hurt you I think that's right Rachel, but I think it goes deeper than that Coming off of the funeral services last week for Ayatollah Haman a who was killed in the first day of the war I think that the message from the Iranians was we went up against the world's biggest superpower and we survived And then they tried to go buy us off with some kind of agreement to give up our nuclear program and give up control over our own territory. And we're going to show them that we're not just motivated by money, although obviously the Iranians would love to be able to sell their oil on the open markets, but that this is about pride. It's about nationalism. It's about showing that a larger power

17:51and imperial power in the minds of the Iranians is not going to push them around. And I think you could argue that that was something the administration missed from the beginning, that they viewed this fundamentally as the equivalent of a real estate deal, that everybody's going to act in their rational economic interest. And in fact, the administration was up against a revolutionary government whose ideology has been hinged for 47 years on direct opposition to the United States. It's really interesting, David, that the United States may have totally misunderstood or misinterpreted or sort of misjudged Iran's motivations here. And yet, as we've talked about on the show before, Iran

18:44knows that time is on its side, right? Because they know that the longer they keep the straight closed, the higher gas prices will be. That is painful for Trump. We're entering a midterm. So it almost feels like they kind of understand us, but perhaps we have not really understood them. That's right, Rachel, but I think they also understand one other thing. President Trump has said publicly a few times. He just let it slip. You know, I can't fight this war.

19:11the way I'd like to fight it, which was basically be putting ground troops on to take the nuclear material, grab Karg Island where they export oil from, do all the things you would do if you were at complete and total war with the country. And he can't do it because he knows the American people and the Congress would not stand for a ground war that results in significant casualties. And so the result is he has been relying on the power of the U.S. military to bomb Iran into submission. Then he got to the second phase of this, Rachel, where he believed that even if he couldn't make the government collapse, he could make them give up their nuclear program. When he couldn't do that and oil prices went so high, he called for a ceasefire and then eventually turned to diplomacy. And it's that diplomacy that has now fallen apart, perhaps because it was rushed.

20:10And now he's looking for plan C or D, depending on where you think we are. And that's kind of what I'm curious about, David. What phase of the war do you think we are entering now? I think we're in the phase of the war where we're trying again things that didn't work the first time. You know, when he did the blockade for the first time, he said, this is going to cause the Iranian economy to collapse within days.

20:38They won't have any place to pump their oil. Their tanks are full and so forth. And then three weeks ago when he did the agreement, he essentially allowed the Iranians to go ship that oil around the world and get dollars for it. Now he's trying that whole process all over again. But the administration has not made an argument to us yet that this is going to be any more effective the second time than it was the first. Do you think that David Even though we seem to be going back to square one Do you get any indication from your reporting that the Trump administration is in some way? beginning to reckon with the idea that there is no quick way to end this conflict Rachel it's the most fascinating question because I think until a week or two ago, I would have said no but in recent days I've heard the doubts voice sort of

21:34in smaller voices in unanswered questions. And I think they now recognize that a war that they initially told Americans would be over in four to six weeks. A war where the president said repeatedly, oh, I just need another week or so to clean this up and the forces will begin withdrawing. I think they now realize that they are stuck there for some time. That if the Iranians are going to claim sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, that there is no way to withdraw a significant American naval force if you are determined to keep that commerce open. You may remember that when we were closing in on this 14-point plan, the president called me. I was in London. I think you and I talked the same night, right? And what he said was, I'm gonna try this agreement, but if it doesn't work, I'm going to

22:34patrol the entire Mideast, basically ad infinitum, and charge everyone in the region, the Arab states, everybody who's protected by the US, a 20% fee, 20% of the value of the cargo they are delivering, and the US will basically be the paid peacekeeper of the region. It was kind of a shocking thing because his own Secretary of State was telling us that the goal was to actually restore the straight to the pre-war period where there were no charges for anything, no tolls, no service fees. And here was his own boss, the president saying, yeah, there'll be a 20% security charge that goes to the taxpayers of the United States. Well, he dropped it after that phone call until Monday. Well, we're taking over the straight. They have nothing. They've got nothing. So when he went on Fox News,

23:31and repeated that exact same concept. Well, inherent in that concept is sort of an admission that the US could be there for months, for years, until there's an alternative way to get the region's oil to the markets of the world. And even if we are not at full-scale war, even if we are just caught on the precipice, between war and peace, more like a counterterrorism operation than a full-scale war. That is the definition of the kind of forever war presence, even if we're not taking significant casualties, unfortunately so far we have not. But that is exactly what his MAGA supporters were worried about with Iran, that we would go in and get stuck. David Sanger, thank you so much.

24:36Always great to be with you, Rachel. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. A federal immigration agent shot and killed a person in a vehicle on Monday morning in Maine. The second fatal shooting in a week involving an ICE agent firing into a vehicle. Agents were looking for a person who was in the country illegally, according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security, and they stopped a vehicle belonging to what the agency described as a, quote, illegal alien.

25:20The agency claimed that the driver then, quote, weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement, prompting an officer to open fire. It was unclear whether the driver was the same person that agents were searching for. No video footage had emerged as of Monday night to confirm the government's version of events. And Lindsay took care of his little sister in years long departed. It's my honor to ask his little sister, Darlene Graham, to finish his work.

25:51Governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina said that he would appoint Senator Lindsey Graham's sister, Darlene Graham Nordone, to finish his Senate term after Graham's death on Saturday. McMaster said that he asked Nordone to fill the seat after they spoke immediately after Graham's death, and that she had accepted, quote, through tears. Lindsey has always been there for me, and now I will be there for him. Today's episode was produced by Osta Chaturvati, Chris Benderev and Rochelle Bonja. It was edited by Chris Haxle and Devin Taylor, and contains music by Marian Lazano. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.