US Vice President JD Vance has said all options remain on the table against Iran, and ruled out talks unless Tehran halts attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s First Vice President, Mohammad Reza Aref, has promised an asymmetrical and multi-layered response to American attacks.

Read together, those two statements describe why this war has not ended, and why the mechanism that would end it keeps failing in the same place.

The sequencing problem

Washington’s position is that shipping attacks must stop before negotiations begin. Tehran’s position, consistently, has been that strikes must stop before it will stop.

Neither is unreasonable on its own terms. A government that negotiates while its ships are being hit has rewarded the attacks. A government that stops its only source of leverage before talks begin arrives with nothing.

This is the same structure we identified in the deadlock over disarmament sequencing elsewhere in the region: both parties are asking the other to give up their instrument first, and describing that demand as a precondition rather than a concession. Preconditions of this shape are usually resolved by a third party who can guarantee simultaneity — which is what mediators are for, and why the June memorandum of understanding was reached through mediation rather than direct talks.

That memorandum has not held. As we have noted before, a memorandum of understanding is not a treaty and contains no enforcement mechanism, which is precisely why it could be agreed quickly and precisely why it has not survived contact with either side’s incentives.

What “asymmetrical” signals

Aref’s choice of word is doctrinal rather than rhetorical. Asymmetric warfare, in Iranian military writing, has a specific meaning developed over decades: a weaker conventional force does not attempt to match a stronger one, but attacks where the stronger side is exposed and cannot easily retaliate proportionately.

In practice that has meant small fast attack craft rather than capital ships, mines and anti-ship missiles rather than a blue-water navy, and operations conducted through partners rather than directly. “Multi-layered” points at the same idea: several simultaneous forms of pressure, no single one of which justifies a full response.

The strategy’s logic is that commercial shipping is the asymmetry. Iran cannot defeat the US Navy. It can make insurers unwilling to cover a route, which achieves an economic effect no warship can prevent.

That is why the American precondition targets shipping specifically, and why it is the hardest thing for Tehran to concede.

The costs are landing on third parties

Meanwhile the people paying for the deadlock mostly have no part in it.

Two Filipino seafarers were killed this week when an attack struck a Saudi-owned tanker, as we reported yesterday. American strikes on southern Iran on Tuesday killed civilians, including four at a wedding in Sirik, and the Iranian Red Crescent has asked the International Criminal Court to act. Iranian retaliation has gone to bases in Kuwait and the UAE, neither of which is a belligerent.

Inside Iran, the currency collapse has pushed basic food costs beyond many households, something we examined in our piece on the price of cooking oil.

Why “all options on the table” is not new information

The phrase has been used by American administrations about Iran for more than two decades, across both parties. It communicates that force has not been excluded, which was already obvious given that strikes are ongoing.

The substantive content of Vance’s remarks is the precondition, not the threat. Naming a specific, verifiable condition for talks is more informative than a warning, because it is checkable: either commercial vessels are being attacked or they are not.

It is also, unusually for a precondition, one a third party could verify without either government’s cooperation. Shipping incidents are reported by maritime authorities and priced by insurers within hours.

What to watch

A pause in shipping attacks lasting more than a week or two, without any announcement. Neither side can afford to describe a de-escalation as a concession, so if this ends, it will most likely end quietly and be acknowledged afterwards.

Sources

• Al Jazeera live coverage of the US-Iran war, 4 September 2026
• Statements by US Vice President JD Vance and Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref
• Council on Foreign Relations Global Conflict Tracker, conflict with Iran