Iran Closed the Strait Again. The US Says It Didn't. Both Are Negotiating in Switzerland.
Five days after signing the MOU, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy broadcast warnings to vessels not to approach the waterway and said ships' safety could not be guaranteed. Iran's top joint military command called the closure the "first step" in response to breaches by the United States and Israel - specifically, Israeli strikes in Lebanon that killed at least 16 people overnight Friday, including two children, in what Lebanese civil defense agencies described as some of the worst single-day casualties since the March ceasefire.
US Central Command pushed back immediately. "Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz," CENTCOM spokesperson Captain Tim Hawkins said in a statement. "Traffic continues to flow, and US forces are monitoring the situation to ensure this remains the case." CENTCOM's own data showed 55 merchant ships transited the waterway on Saturday, moving more than 17 million barrels of oil - a number Vance later called a record going back to before the conflict started. Two things were simultaneously true: Iran had declared the strait closed, and ships were still moving through it.
JD Vance landed in Switzerland on Sunday morning to join special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at a resort overlooking Lake Lucerne. The Iranian delegation was already on the ground. Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Qatari mediators joined the table. The emergency session that wasn't supposed to happen - Lebanon - was added to the agenda.
What the MOU Actually Required
The June 17 memorandum of understanding, signed at Versailles by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, contained 14 clauses. The first committed to the "immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon." The strait's full reopening was a separate commitment, contingent on that first clause holding.
Israel did not sign the MOU. Israel has said explicitly it is not bound by it. When Israeli forces continued striking Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon after the signing - killing dozens across the following days - Iran's position was that the United States had failed to implement its own agreement. The US position, maintained by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was that the Iran deal and the Lebanon conflict were diplomatically separate tracks. That position had already been under strain before the MOU was signed; it collapsed within 72 hours of the signature.
The structural problem was visible from the start. Rubio had spent weeks trying to keep the Iran nuclear file and the Lebanon conflict in separate compartments. The MOU's first clause - written by Trump's special envoys, not Rubio - put Lebanon back inside the frame. A Middle Eastern official told CBS News that Rubio's envoys and Rubio himself were out of sync on precisely this point. Israeli officials, according to the same source, saw the Lebanon clause as a concession to Iran that Trump's negotiating team had made without fully accounting for Israeli redlines.
The Switzerland Table
Vance told reporters before boarding for Geneva that things in Lebanon were "getting better" and "slowing down" - a characterization that ran against the same night's casualty reports. His public optimism was calibrated for a specific purpose: keeping Iran at the table long enough for the nuclear talks to begin in earnest.
Inside the resort at Bürgenstock, the Iranian delegation declined to stand beside the US, Pakistan, and Qatar in front of cameras - a visible signal of how far the talks were from the kind of images diplomatic progress usually generates. Vance opened by thanking Pakistan and Qatar for their mediation and outlining what the US side wanted from the 60-day window: "The opening of the Strait of Hormuz, the ending of the Iranian nuclear program."
The nuclear file is the harder of the two. Iran's position entering Switzerland was that it had already made the significant concession of agreeing to demilitarize the strait - leverage it was now exercising again. The US position was that the MOU was a framework and Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity remained the central unresolved issue. IAEA director general Rafael Grossi met with Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis on the sidelines; his agency has not been readmitted to Iranian facilities.
Trump, meanwhile, posted on Truth Social that there would be "NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period" - and that after the 60 days, if no deal was reached, the United States would impose its own tolls on ships transiting the waterway, claiming the proceeds as payment for "services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East." Senator Lindsey Graham, on a separate network, was more direct: "We're going to run it."
What Monday Looks Like
More talks are scheduled. Iran's delegation said publicly that negotiations would not advance without first addressing Lebanon. The US said the two tracks are linked but distinct. Israel said it is not party to either track.
The 60-day clock for a final nuclear settlement started June 18. As of Sunday, Day 4, the strait is either closed or open depending on which government's statement you accept, a fresh ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was announced Friday and appeared to have lasted less than 24 hours, and the two chief negotiating parties are in the same Swiss resort but won't stand beside each other for photographs. Neither Washington nor Tehran wants the process to collapse. That is not the same thing as a process that is working.
