President Donald Trump’s threat to seize the rest of Iran if Tehran does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz is the clearest sign yet that the 60-day ceasefire signed earlier this month was never the breakthrough it was sold as. In a call relayed to Fox News, Trump told Iranian officials “we’ll take over the rest of the country,” a striking escalation from his earlier, narrower threats to seize Iran’s oil infrastructure or simply control the strait itself.
To understand why this threat lands the way it does, it helps to remember what the ceasefire actually was. The war began on February 28, when the United States and Israel launched strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader and a string of senior officials. Months of fighting followed, interrupted by a string of short-lived truces that kept collapsing. The current framework, known as the Islamabad Memorandum, was only finalized on June 12 and formally signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on June 17, after Pakistani and Qatari mediators scrambled to stop an Iranian strike on Israel that nearly derailed the whole process.
Even by the standards of wartime diplomacy, the deal was thin. It called for an immediate halt to strikes, removal of the US naval blockade within 30 days, and toll-free reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas once passed. In exchange, Iran would receive sanctions waivers, access to some of its frozen assets and, according to leaked drafts, a fund worth at least 300 billion dollars meant to draw investment back into the country. But the document deliberately punted on almost everything substantive. It did not resolve what happens to Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, did not touch Iran’s ballistic missile program, and said nothing about its network of armed allies across the region. Those questions were pushed into the 60-day negotiating window that is now playing out, badly, in Switzerland.
It also never bound Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said openly that Israel would “preserve its freedom of action” against Hezbollah, and fighting in Lebanon never really stopped. Israeli strikes on Beirut in the days after the signing prompted Iran to call the ceasefire all but meaningless, even as Tehran stopped short of formally abandoning it.
That is the backdrop against which Trump’s latest threat has to be read. Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz again over the weekend, citing the continued Israeli campaign in Lebanon, just days after agreeing to keep it open. Trump responded by warning Tehran’s negotiators directly, telling them “you won’t have a country” and floating both a takeover of the strait and, in his most extreme framing yet, of Iran itself, an idea he compared to how Washington took control of Venezuela’s oil sector after capturing Nicolás Maduro in January. Senator Lindsey Graham echoed the threat publicly, saying the US would seize the strait by force and “charge a fee for those who go through” if the deal collapses.
Iran’s response has been defiant rather than conciliatory. Parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf dismissed the threats outright, saying Iran’s armed forces were “ready to respond… in a different way,” and Iranian state media reported that the delegation in Switzerland halted talks in protest, though neither government has confirmed a full walkout. Vice President JD Vance, who is leading the US side of the negotiations, has tried to strike a calmer tone, insisting the ceasefire is “holding,” even as Trump’s social media posts undercut him in real time.
What makes this moment genuinely dangerous is that the framework was always more political roadmap than binding treaty. Unlike the detailed 2015 nuclear deal it loosely echoes, the Islamabad Memorandum left the hardest issues, enrichment, missiles, regional proxies, for later, betting that 60 days of goodwill would be enough to resolve them. Instead, the first real test of that goodwill, Iran’s decision to reclose the strait over a war it is not even formally part of, has produced not a negotiating session but a threat to dismantle the Iranian state.
Whether this is genuine escalation or another round of Trump’s familiar brinkmanship, seen before in April when he warned of a “whole civilization” dying, remains unclear. But each cycle of threat and walk-back has left the ceasefire thinner than the last, and global oil markets, still adjusting to a war that has already pushed gas prices past four dollars a gallon in the US, are watching to see whether this is the round that breaks it for good.
Related coverage from Global Echos: Trump is Caught Between the Ally He Cannot Lose and the Deal He Cannot Resist, on the tension between Trump’s pursuit of an Iran deal and his relationship with Israel.
