LONDON – The United States and Iran have now perfected a new kind of “ceasefire”, one that no one respects yet no one abandons, a game in which the guns still fire because both sides believe that talking and shooting are not opposing alternatives, but instruments in the same process.

What has unfolded across the Gulf over the past forty-eight hours - two consecutive nights of US airstrikes on Iran and Iranian missile barrages against the Arab monarchies in the region - looks like the collapse of the June memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the US and Iran. The reality, however, is that the current violence does not spell the failure of diplomacy, but merely its continuation by other means.

The sequence of the latest events is by now predictable. Iranian drones struck tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, and the US Central Command answered with strikes on Iranian air-defence installations, coastal radars, and Iranian fast attack boats, the craft that have done the bulk of the harassment of ships in the international waterway.

Anyone who followed the near-identical exchange of fire between the US and Iran at the end of June will recognise the choreography.

The rhetoric this time is, however, angrier, even lurid. The ceasefire with Iran, US President Donald Trump said on July 8 during a visit to the Turkish capital of Ankara to