SITUATION:
The United States and Israel launched strikes on Iranian nuclear and military sites on February 28, 2026, opening a war that has run in fits and starts ever since. A Pakistani-brokered ceasefire took hold on April 8, broke down within hours over disagreements about whether Lebanon was covered, and gave way to a US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz on April 13 after follow-up talks in Islamabad collapsed.
On June 17, President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed the non-binding Islamabad Memorandum, a 14-point framework meant to end the war, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and set up 60 days of technical talks on Iran’s nuclear program. Trump signed it from Versailles during the G7 summit. Ten days later, fighting broke out again. Iran struck a cargo ship in the strait and fired missiles and drones at US-linked sites in Bahrain and Kuwait; the US answered with strikes on Iranian coastal military infrastructure. Both governments accused the other of breaking the truce.
THE TRUTH:
Trump’s own team has never maintained a consistent answer or settled on a single story about how this war began. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially told Congress the US struck in collective self-defense of Israel, since Israeli action would likely draw Iranian retaliation against American forces. A day later, Trump gave reporters a different account entirely, saying flatly that he believed Iran was preparing to strike the United States first: “It was my opinion that they were going to attack if we didn’t do it.” Rubio then walked back his own explanation to align with the president’s. What isn’t in dispute is the sequence of events. The United States and Israel struck first, on February 28. Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone attacks against US bases and Gulf shipping came afterward.
The civilian toll of that opening day deserves its own honest look. On February 28, a US missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, a small town in southern Iran, killing at least 108 schoolchildren along with teachers and parents who had rushed to pick their kids up early. The Associated Press, Amnesty International, and TIME have each independently traced the strike back to a US-made Tomahawk missile, using satellite imagery, munition fragments recovered at the site, and a geolocated video showing the missile’s flight path. The Washington Post has reported that the school incorrectly sat on a Pentagon target list and was mistaken for a military site tied to an adjacent IRGC compound. President Trump has denied US responsibility more than once, at one point falsely blaming Iran’s own munitions for the strike. More than four months later, the Pentagon still hasn’t released its internal investigation or offered a public accounting of what happened. Whatever the cause, American voters deserve a straight answer, not silence, when a strike carried out in their name kills this many children.
The ceasefire record is similarly complicated for anyone looking for a clean story about who has kept their word. Hours after the April 8 truce was announced, Israel launched heavy strikes on Lebanon, which Iran said violated the spirit of the deal; the US and Israel countered that Lebanon was never part of the agreement. When US Navy destroyers moved to “clear” the strait on April 11 without an agreement from Tehran, Iran called it a provocation and threatened to fire on the ships. Two days later Trump ordered a formal blockade, a step Iran treated as a ceasefire breach in itself even as US officials described it as a defensive freedom-of-navigation operation. Since the June 17 memorandum, the clearer pattern has been Iranian strikes on commercial shipping and on Bahrain and Kuwait, met by US retaliatory strikes on Iranian coastal sites that Washington frames as responses rather than violations. Both governments have a case to make. Neither has a clean one.
WHY IT MATTERS:
The economic fallout has landed on ordinary Americans regardless of who fired first. Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate have both traded in the low-to-mid $70s a barrel through late June, and the International Energy Agency has called the disruption to Hormuz traffic the largest shock to global oil supply on record, since roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and gas moves through that strait. Global trade took a direct hit too: flights across the Middle East were grounded for days at a stretch, Dubai’s airport was damaged by drone strikes, and shipping lines rerouted around both Hormuz and the Red Sea, adding time and cost to goods moving through some of the busiest lanes on the planet.
Fertilizer has been hit especially hard, and that bill is landing on American farms. The Persian Gulf supplies roughly 40 to 50 percent of the world’s traded urea and a similar share of the sulfur used to make fertilizer and process copper and other metals, almost all of it shipped through Hormuz. Urea prices roughly doubled between February and April, and anhydrous ammonia in the Midwest jumped from a pre-war average of $828 a ton to over $1,100 a ton by mid-April, according to USDA pricing data. Illinois farm economists put the added cost at more than $20 an acre this planting season alone, with the fuller impact expected to hit in 2027 as pre-war fertilizer stockpiles run out. None of that is abstract. It shows up at the co-op, and ultimately at the grocery store.
The deal meant to end all this is also worth a hard look, because Trump has repeatedly said it beats the nuclear agreement Barack Obama’s administration negotiated in 2015. It doesn’t. In fact, it’s much worse.
The Obama-negotiated JCPOA ran hundreds of pages, capped Iranian uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent for fifteen years, confined all enrichment to a single inspected facility, and bound Iran to a detailed, multilateral inspection regime backed by China, Russia, the UK, France, and Germany alongside the US.
Trump’s non-binding Islamabad Memorandum is a page and a half. It contains no enrichment cap, no facility restrictions, and no multilateral verification framework, deferring all of that to future talks.
Iran’s pledge not to “procure or develop” nuclear weapons is not a new concession; Iran made the same promise decades ago under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and repeated it in the JCPOA itself. In exchange for that unchanged pledge, the memorandum immediately waives US sanctions on Iranian oil exports, unlocks Iran’s frozen assets, and commits to a $300 billion reconstruction fund, all while Iran’s uranium stockpile sits far closer to weapons-grade than it did in 2015. Arms control analysts across the political spectrum have made the same point: a deal that merely restates commitments Iran already made, while handing over more up front than the 2015 agreement did, is not an improvement on it. It’s a weaker deal sold with a stronger sales pitch.