Washington identified the attacker within hours. A Singapore-flagged cargo ship, the Ever Lovely, took an Iranian drone to the bridge on Thursday as it exited the Strait of Hormuz, several miles off the coast of Oman. US officials named the perpetrator without hedging: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Then, asked what the United States intended to do about it, an official said only that the government was aware of the reports and looking into them.

A shipping lane that hugs the Omani coastline is doing something the IRGC cannot tolerate: it lets tankers leave the Persian Gulf without asking Tehran for permission. Oman, working with the International Maritime Organization, has now formalized a temporary, fee-free corridor through the southern half of the Strait of Hormuz, with explicit navigational coordinates issued jointly by Muscat and the IMO. Muscat frames it as freedom-of-navigation housekeeping. For Iran, it is a structural threat to the one piece of leverage the war left it holding.

The Strait of Hormuz is reopening, and the oil market has already moved on. Brent settled below $79 a barrel this week, its lowest level since early March and a fourth consecutive session of losses — the longest losing streak of the year. The premium that carried Brent above $114 in March, the fear that priced in a closed chokepoint handling a fifth of the world’s crude, has bled out in the span of a few sessions. The memorandum of understanding signed by Washington and Tehran reopens the waterway without Iranian tolls for at least sixty days and clears Iran to sell oil immediately. Traders are pricing the supply. They are not pricing the wait.

Unconditional surrender is a specific thing. It is not a mood or a press line. It is a document signed on a deck, with no terms, by a party that has run out of them. The defeated keep nothing they are not handed back out of pity. By that standard, exactly one government signed an unconditional surrender this week, and it was not the one in Tehran.

The President says otherwise. Asked by a reporter why the memorandum he digitally signed in Versailles looked nothing like a capitulation, he considered the question and concluded that, well, really, it probably is one. This is the foundational technique of the entire enterprise: a retreat, narrated with sufficient confidence, becomes an advance. He did not surrender. He merely signed the only kind of document a surrendering party signs, and then renamed it.

On Thursday, President Trump announced a “great settlement” with Iran, canceled the evening’s planned strikes, and suggested a signing ceremony could come as soon as the weekend. Within hours, Tehran answered. The foreign ministry stated that Iran “has not reached a final conclusion on the agreement.” A source close to the negotiating team, quoted by the IRGC-linked Fars agency, denied that any text of the memorandum had been approved at all. When the president listed the parties that had signed off on the deal’s concepts — the United States, the regional mediators, the Gulf states — Iran was the name missing from the list.

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that the United States will resume bombing Iran later in the day, telling reporters at the White House that American forces would be hitting the Islamic Republic “very hard” — the second consecutive day of strikes triggered by the downing of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week.

“We hit ’em hard yesterday and we’re going to hit ’em hard again today,” Trump said, framing the renewed campaign as both retaliation for the helicopter incident and punishment for Tehran’s foot-dragging at the negotiating table. In a Truth Social post earlier in the morning, the president declared that Iran would “pay the price” for taking too long to close a deal, dismissing the Islamic Republic as “all talk and no action.”

The story being told about this week is that Iran has the initiative. The drones, the missiles at Kuwait and Bahrain, the refusal to come to terms — all of it read as a regime dictating the tempo while a reluctant Washington waits for a deal. That reading mistakes motion for control. The party that controls the strategic clock is the one running the blockade, and that party is not Iran.

The United States has stopped arguing with Iran over who controls the Strait of Hormuz and started prosecuting the transaction itself. On May 27, the Treasury Department added Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority to the Specially Designated Nationals list under Executive Order 13224, the counterterrorism authority reserved for entities that finance terror. The designation does not contest Tehran’s claim to administer the strait. It renders the act of buying passage a sanctionable offense, and in doing so it inverts the entire logic of the toll regime.

The ceasefire was already fragile. The Iranian delegation had barely landed in Doha. And then the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy fired on a US oil tanker attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

That is the situation as of the early hours of May 28. According to IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News, an American oil tanker entered the strait with its radar system switched off — a provocation, in Tehran’s framing — and was turned back after IRGC naval forces fired toward the vessel. The US struck what it described as a “burnt area” near Bandar Abbas in response. No casualties were reported on either side.

On Memorial Day, while Donald Trump posted that negotiations with Iran were “proceeding nicely,” U.S. Central Command was conducting airstrikes on Iranian territory. The contradiction was not incidental. It is the operating condition of the current ceasefire — a state of managed belligerence in which neither side has agreed on what stopping the war actually means.

CENTCOM spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins confirmed Monday that U.S. forces struck missile launch sites and Iranian boats in southern Iran that were, per the statement, “attempting to emplace mines.” The justification was self-defense. The framing was restraint. The reality is that strikes under a nominally active ceasefire have become routine enough that the announcement generated less alarm than the diplomatic commentary surrounding it.