Why the Cease-Fire With Iran Keeps Crumbling

Hey. Hold up. This is your minute. Your day to play, to make, to move, to move through, to explore. It's your body to rest, to nourish, to grow. It's your mind, you know. It's your place, your life, to love, to dream, to change. It's your world to understand. The New York Times. Find out more at nytimes.com/yourworld. From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. On Monday, The US and Iran exchanged attacks and increasingly fiery rhetoric for the third day in a row, leaving both sides on the verge of a full blown return to the war. Today, my colleague David Sanger explains what brought us to this point and what this new phase tells us about how difficult it will be for the war to end. It's Tuesday, July 14. David Sanger, welcome back to The Daily. Good to be with you, Rachel. David, the last time we had you on the show, Iran and The United States had just reached what felt like at the time to be quite a shaky ceasefire. We knew that the agreement had been pretty rushed. And since then, it feels like everything has basically just fallen apart. The US just announced a blockade of Iranian ports. It's going into effect Tuesday afternoon. And so I guess my first question is, is the agreement that we last talked to you about even still in effect? There's not much of it left. We all suspected, Rachel, that this agreement had the seeds of its own destruction built in. Mhmm. But I think even the most cynical about how the Iranians and the Americans would interpret it differently did not expect it to fall apart quite as quickly as it did. And I think if you're trying to figure out why that's happened, it basically lies in the fact that it was so hastily pieced together. It was so hastily announced when vice president Vance was sent over to sign a document. He wouldn't even shake hands with the Iranians, and they wouldn't shake hands with him. Mhmm. It was bound to fail. Right. You had basically told us, I think, that this agreement essentially kicked the can down the road on a lot of kind of really big important issues between The United States and Iran that both sides needed to hash out. That's right, Rachel. And we were all pretty focused at the time on what needed to be accomplished in this sixty day long negotiation. The first issue, of course, was the nuclear program on which the 14 statement only said that Iran would blend down its nuclear material, essentially dilute it so that it couldn't be used for weapons. Mhmm. But it left unclear who was going to ultimately have possession of that nuclear material, or whether there would be negotiations to limit Iran's missile program or whether there would be any language in a permanent agreement that would benefit the protesters who …