Less than a month after a ceasefire was signed between the US and Iran, conflict has returned to the Middle East. The peace agreement Donald Trump signed at the palace of Versailles in France on June 18 – which he hailed as Iran’s “unconditional surrender” – is now, in the US president’s own words, “over”. I recently argued that the memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Washington and Tehran was best understood not as a peace agreement but as a “deferred crisis” – a ceasefire with a built-