The ceasefire Trump had promoted as a personal victory collapsed within weeks. The 14-point memorandum signed June 17, 2026, which was supposed to halt the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for a $300 billion reconstruction fund, eroded almost immediately over disputes about who was violating it.
The unraveling accelerated in late June. On June 25, a Singapore-flagged tanker, the Ever Lovely, was struck by a projectile in the Strait of Hormuz, which the U.S. blamed on Iran. U.S. forces retaliated on June 26-28 with strikes on Iranian military infrastructure, drone facilities, and air defenses, with Trump claiming Iran had violated the deal again.
At a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, in early July, Trump declared the agreement dead. “For me, I think it's over,” he said. “I don't want to deal with them anymore, they're scum,” calling Iran's leaders “sick people” and “vicious, violent people.” On July 8, Iran launched missile and drone attacks targeting Bahrain and Kuwait, and oil prices jumped 6.4% to $78.93 a barrel.
The collapse returns the country to open conflict in a war Trump began in February 2026 without congressional authorization, after months in which he alternately declared victory, threatened to “take over” Iran, and insisted a deal was at hand. The framework he called a triumph reopened the door to exactly the escalation it was meant to end (see Trump's Iran War Framework Trades an Open Strait of Hormuz for $300 Billion in Reconstruction and a Reversal on Enrichment and Iran Recloses the Strait of Hormuz, Trump Threatens to 'Take Over' the Country, and the Talks Collapse).
By July 8 Trump was calling the memorandum “null and void.” That day, after three oil tankers were attacked in the Strait of Hormuz, he told reporters he would “probably” go ahead with the operation: “We're going to hit them hard tonight.” U.S. forces struck Iranian coastal cities. Thirteen American service members have been confirmed killed in the conflict, a count critics say understates the true toll.
One widely circulated death should not be attributed to the fighting. The Navy declared Cmdr. Gabriel Edwards dead on July 7 after a 102-hour search; his helicopter made an emergency landing in the Arabian Sea on July 1, and three of the four aboard were rescued. Coverage paired his death with the war's resumption, but the Navy says the incident was not caused by hostile action, and it remains under investigation.
At the same summit, Trump recast what the war had been for. Asked whether the campaign had reached a strategic dead end, he said it had not, because it had already succeeded: “I was there for one reason: that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I call it, we denuclearize Iran... that's happened; they will never have a nuclear weapon.” He said Iran's nuclear material now sits “so far down under a mountain” as to be unreachable. Days earlier he told CNBC, “This is not a war per se. It's the de-nuking of Iran.”
The claim sits awkwardly against his own record. He launched the war in February citing an imminent nuclear threat, after spending eight months insisting the program had already been obliterated, and two weeks before the first strikes he said Iran had been left without even a “potential capability.” If Iran was denuclearized before the war, the war's stated purpose was already accomplished. On July 7 the United States struck more than 80 Iranian targets and reimposed oil sanctions. On July 10, Trump formally notified Congress under the War Powers Act that U.S. forces had resumed military action against Iran, citing Iranian attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz; the notice started a fresh 60-day clock. Democrats countered that the war had actually begun on February 28 with Operation Epic Fury and that the president cannot unilaterally restart the clock (see In the Iran War's First Days, Trump and His Top Aides Gave Conflicting Reasons for Starting It).
In a Fox News interview aired July 14, Trump described where the strikes go next in terms international law forbids. Asked whether the campaign would expand, he said, “Ultimately, we'll hit energy targets,” vowed to hit Iran “very hard” that week, and continued: “next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges. We're going to knock out all their power plants. We're going to knock out all their bridges, unless they get to the table and negotiate.” The Geneva Conventions protect objects indispensable to civilian survival from attack or reprisal; announcing blanket strikes on a country's power plants and bridges as negotiating leverage is a description of collective punishment (see Trump Threatens to Destroy Iran's Desalination Plants, Targeting Civilian Drinking Water Infrastructure That International Law Experts Call a 'Textbook War Crime').