After UNGA: Can a broken memorandum be put back together?

For a moment this week, the freeze between Washington and Tehran looked like it might actually crack. On 23rd September, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi sat down with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in New York — the most senior direct contact between the two sides since the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding fell apart two months earlier. Three days later, Araghchi told the New York Times and The Guardian that the Strait of Hormuz could reopen within a week, if Washington met Tehran’s conditions. That one conditional sentence tells you almost everything about where this stands. Not resolved. Not fully back to war footing either. Suspended somewhere in between, where both sides already know roughly what a deal […]