It was all supposed to be so uncomplicated. Assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader. Decapitate the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Encourage the Iranian people to rise up in rebellion.
Then watch from afar, with minimal US involvement, as the Islamic Republic, which has antagonised and exasperated America since the Iranian Revolution in the late-1970s, crumbled.
Regime change might not be quite as straightforward as the lightning military operation which seized the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and put in place a more US-friendly administration in Caracas. But, at most, Operation Epic Fury would be over in maybe four weeks. Six weeks tops.
Here we are, however, eleven weeks on, with President Donald Trump still trying to bring to an end to a war he did not need to start, and resorting again to US strikes which so far have failed spectacularly to bring a newly emboldened Tehran regime to heel.
Stocks tumbled at the opening after US President Donald Trump’s announcement that the ceasefire with Iran is over. (Picture: Michael Santiago/Getty Images)In announcing its latest sorties, US Central Command said the strikes were in retaliation for “recent unjustified aggression against commercial shipping and civilian crews” in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump, speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, had threatened to “hit them hard tonight.”
Earlier this week, the US military had already carried out strikes following a string of attacks on commercial vessels, including oil tankers owned by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in a waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas used to pass unimpeded.
In tit-for-tat exchanges, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted US military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait.
This week has seen the most serious breaches yet of the ceasefire agreement signed on June 17th, a memorandum of understanding, as it was called, which paved the way for further talks between Washington and Tehran.
President Trump said he does not expect a full-scale conflict with Iran to resume, but warned the US would retaliate 'ten times harder' for any strikes t.co/SHs9rurpdx pic.twitter.com/DiYDBCf8hJ
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 8, 2026Trump claims Iran has violated the ceasefire everyday. “They lie. They cheat,” he harrumphed in Ankara, at the Nato summit. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore, they’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people.”
Only last month, the president had used honeyed words to describe Iran’s leaders, saying they were “very rational people” and “nice to deal with”. Now, as well as calling them “cuckoo,” “evil” and “dirty players,” he says of the ceasefire: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”
The memorandum of understanding was rushed through last month, partly so that it could be completed before Trump’s 80th birthday celebrations, which culminated with that UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.
Days before, the President flourished his Sharpie pen to add his signature to the document, in the historically ominous setting of the Palace of Versailles where the ill-fated treaty which brought World War I to end was hatched.
US President Donald Trump and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian with the signed peace deal, now broken. (Picture: Various/AFP via Getty Images)Just two pages long, the 14-point memorandum granted major concessions to Iran, such as sanctions relief and the release of billions of dollars in frozen assets. In return, Iran supposedly agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which, remember, was open when the war began.
The thorniest issue, the future of Iran’s nuclear programme and what to do with its stockpile of near-weapons-grade nuclear fuel, would be left to further talks, which have not yet produced any meaningful progress.
Such was the haste to deliver a face-saving ceasefire agreement before Trump’s birthday that key details were not adequately finessed or even addressed.
Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles did not even merit a mention, even though at various points of the conflict Trump had stated their annihilation was a paramount US war aim. How much control Iran would continue to exert over the Strait of Hormuz was a grey area clouded by ambiguity. Unsurprisingly, this speedily-drafted plan was dubbed the memorandum of misunderstanding.
Even the sixty-day deadline set for a more comprehensive peace deal seemed wildly optimistic. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the multilateral nuclear deal agreed upon in 2015 by the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France, China and Germany, had taken almost two years of painstaking talks to finalise.
Iran has always played the long game, while Trump is preoccupied with daily news cycles. As the president told aides at the start of his first administration, in an edict which went to the heart of his modus operandi, every day should be treated as if it were a reality show with him always ending up on top.
This grab made from video footage of an unknown source posted on social media show explosions going off in Iran’s major port city of Bandar Abbas. (Picture: Social Media/AFP)Trump’s impatience, and the impulsiveness it engenders, has been on full display during this on-again-off-again conflict.
It is not just their widely different view of timeframes that sets Tehran and Washington. Trump’s transactional approach to diplomacy, based on the carrots of financial inducements and the stick of threats of civilisational erasure, has run up against Iran’s ideological and theocratic approach to diplomacy.
Trump has been fighting a war of choice. The Islamic Republic has been fighting for its very survival. Repeatedly, over the course of a war now in its seventh month, Iran has been willing to absorb more military pain than the United States has been willing to suffer economic pain.
Suffice to say, oil prices spiked immediately after these renewed hostilities. Brent crude was up 6.6% in after-hours trading, reaching almost $80 a barrel. Fuel and food prices will rise again.
While Trump made approximately $2.2 billion during his first year back in office, according to his mandatory financial report released last week, American voters are feeling the crunch. So, too, are consumers the world over.
Still, it beggars belief that Trump was caught unawares when Iran effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz at the start of the conflict, despite the fact Pentagon military planners had been warning for decades of precisely this eventuality.
In resolving this crisis, it does not help that US diplomacy has such an amateur hour feel. The State Department has been hollowed out. US technical expertise, especially on questions involving the enrichment of uranium, is thin on the ground compared to previous administrations.
Vice President JD Vance with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law. (Picture: Fabrice Coffrini/Pool via Reuters)Trump has entrusted the diplomatic effort to his golf partner Steve Witkoff, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President JD Vance, who, from the very start, has been an opponent of the war.
The 80-year-old president’s cognitive state is also coming under heightened scrutiny. “We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan”, he said at one point in Ankara.
In a sign of the ongoing threats posed by Iran, and his inability to thwart them, the president had to use an old plane as Air Force One to fly from the Nato meeting in Turkey to Britain overnight, rather than the new Boeing 747-8 gifted to him by Qatar which has just gone into service. Trump said he wanted to use the old plane, which often he has complained about, for “old time’s sake.”
But the switch came about following concerns from the Secret Service that the new plane, which was rushed into service, does not have adequate missile defence systems.
This is not a forever war. Trump has not made the mistake of committing tens of thousands of US troops and getting bogged down in another quagmire, as with Iraq or Afghanistan. Trump has told reporters he does not foresee a return to full-scale conflict.
But so far, Operation Epic Fury has been a failed war for the Trump administration. It set out to deny the Tehran regime a nuclear option, and has ended up handing them a potent new weapon, the Strait of Hormuz option.
A murderous regime which looked at the start of the year that it might be toppled by a public uprising, has been handed a lifeline by its mortal enemy, the “Great Satan.”
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