By the summer of 1988, Iran was pumping oil through a jury-rigged system of shuttle tankers. They ran from the bombed-out terminals at Kharg Island, which had once handled ninety percent of the country’s crude exports, to improvised loading points at Sirri and Larak islands. Those lay far down the Gulf at the outer edge of Iraqi air power, though Iraqi jets eventually reached them too. What got through was a fraction of pre-war capacity, loaded at enormous cost and under constant threat. And the price those barrels fetched had been cut in half. Saudi Arabia’s decision to flood the market had cratered crude from around thirty dollars a barrel in late 1985 to barely ten by the spring of 1986. For a country financing a war through oil exports, the income that kept the army supplied was draining away month by month.
On July 20, two days after Tehran formally notified the United Nations, a message from Ayatollah Khomeini was broadcast on Tehran Radio accepting UN Security Council Resolution 598 — the ceasefire resolution Iran had rejected for a full year, at the end of eight years of vowing to fight until Saddam Hussein fell. Khomeini likened the decision to drinking from a poisoned chalice.
The poison was a run of defeats Iran could no longer pay to reverse. That spring and summer, Iraqi offensives had retaken al-Faw and most of the other Iraqi ground Iran held, captured much of its armour and artillery, and pushed into Iran itself. No capital had fallen and no army had surrendered, but rebuilding took money, and the money was gone: the hard currency to import weapons and the export revenue to sustain an economy at war, while Iraq, flush with Soviet arms and Gulf Arab cash, inflicted losses at will. A government that had spent eight years and several hundred thousand lives on a position of absolute theological commitment abandoned it once it could neither win on the battlefield nor pay to rebuild its army.
If money ended the Iran-Iraq War as much as the battlefield did, the larger question is whether it ends wars generally. If it does, what does it predict about the US-Iran memorandum of understanding, the Strait of Hormuz deal that was signed in June 2026 and had unravelled within weeks?
The wrong question
The conventional account of why wars end runs on a simple logic: one side wins, or both sides exhaust each other, or diplomats broker a settlement. Military outcomes drive the timing. The stronger force prevails. This is the framework that shapes newspaper coverage, television analysis, and the implicit assumptions of most foreign-policy commentary. As far as it goes, it is a coherent and correct story.
It is also too incomplete to answer the questions people most want answered: when a specific war will end, and whether the ending will stick.
The political scientist James Fearon started from a puzzle: if war is costly and destructive for everyone involved, rational actors should always be able to find a negotiated outcome both prefer to fighting. Wars happen anyway. They persist because of two mechanisms. The first is private information with incentives to misrepresent: each side knows things about its own capabilities and resolve that it cannot credibly reveal to the other. The second is the commitment problem: neither side can guarantee it will honour a deal, particularly when the balance of power keeps shifting. Applied to endings, the same logic says a war stops when fighting has revealed enough to close the information gap, or when the settlement on offer looks better to both sides than the cost of fighting on.
Battlefield outcomes are one input into that calculation. The money to keep fighting is another. Call them the map and the ledger.
The map shows who controls what territory; the ledger shows whether they can afford to keep controlling it. The map had moved against Khomeini in the spring and summer of 1988, when Iraq retook the al-Faw Peninsula, broke one Iranian position after another and pushed Iranian forces back across the border. Tehran had not fallen and Iran still had an army in the field, but it could not pay to rebuild what it had lost, because the ledger had collapsed.
Fearon’s puzzle concerned how wars start. When he later turned to how long civil wars last, the ones funded by contraband resources such as diamonds, opium and coca turned out to last significantly longer than those that aren’t. The money financing such a war keeps coming in whatever is happening on the ground. The diamond mines of Sierra Leone didn’t care who was winning; the rebels kept selling what they dug, and the war kept its funding.
Wars between states follow the same logic. Working through 104 of them, fought between 1816 and 1991, Branislav Slantchev showed that wars last longer when uncertainty about costs and capabilities persists, and they end when fighting reveals what diplomacy couldn’t: what the war is costing each side. And the longer a war drags on, the worse the terms its initiator ends up accepting. Every extra month of resistance is information that the enemy is tougher than expected, and in Slantchev’s data, that new information outweighs raw resources in deciding how the war ends.
One qualification: the claim that “most wars end through negotiation” is historically recent and only unevenly true. Before 1946, virtually every pair of states at war ended the fight with a clear winner. After the Second World War, more than forty-four percent ended in a tie. Civil wars followed the same path, only later. During the Cold War, four in five ended with one side beating the other, while of those that ended between 1989 and 1997, seventy percent ended in a truce or negotiated settlement. Negotiated settlements became the dominant mode of civil war termination only after the Cold War, when peacekeeping operations, sanctions regimes, and third-party mediation began altering the cost-benefit arithmetic for warring parties without requiring either side to be beaten on the field.
The commitment problem — and why it survives the ceasefire
The commitment problem holds however sincere the signatories are. Can the parties credibly commit to behaving differently when the conditions that caused the war still exist? An agreement signed under economic duress is one the weaker side has every incentive to violate once its capacity recovers. The problem outlasts the shooting and persists until the underlying incentive structure changes. Too many ceasefires leave that structure untouched, which is why so many of them fail.What moves the threshold
If wars end when the cost-benefit calculation crosses a threshold, the next step is to find what pushes a war across it. Civil wars, where the data run deepest, give the sharpest answers.
One of the clearest levers on how long they last is a decline in the prices of the primary commodities the warring country exports. The mechanism is blunt. Commodity exports generate hard currency, and hard currency buys imported weapons. When export revenue drops, whether because global prices crash, export infrastructure gets bombed or sanctions choke the pipeline, weapons procurement capacity declines and the army runs short sooner. Other variables registered. Low per capita income made wars longer. External military intervention on the rebel side shortened conflicts. An earlier version of the study found that extensive forest cover, which gives insurgents shelter, lengthened them too. The commodity-price effect matters most for the cases that follow, because it ties how long a war lasts directly to the money paying for it.
Those findings come from civil wars. Bargaining theory points to the same mechanisms in wars between states, but nobody has measured the commodity-price effect there with the same precision, so the interstate cases below illustrate the mechanism rather than prove it.
Prices and budgets end wars only through the people who decide. As the expected cost of continuing rises above the expected return, the elites controlling the war-making apparatus begin calculating their own interests separately from the coalition’s stated objectives. For certain factions, as the economist Paul Collier has argued, war itself is an economic system, generating revenue through extraction, patronage and smuggling. Such factions have little reason to stop while the war still pays them.
Nobody has measured, across large numbers of wars, whether elite defections predict when ceasefires come. But elite calculation is where a crash in export revenue becomes a ceasefire decision made by a particular person in a particular room: Khomeini in 1988, George H.W. Bush in 1991, Iran’s leadership in 2026.
Third-party economic pressure, in the form of sanctions, credit restrictions, arms embargoes and asset freezes, works like an artificial commodity-price crash imposed from outside. It compresses the timeline to economic non-viability without requiring battlefield advantage. Sanctions rarely topple governments, but they can bring forward the point at which a war becomes unaffordable.
Poison and the balance sheet — Iran-Iraq, 1988
The Iran-Iraq War shows the mechanism most clearly. A theocratic government with maximalist objectives and a stated willingness to accept mass casualties spent eight years publicly committed to fighting on, and stopped when its army was losing and it could no longer pay to rebuild it.
Three threads converged in the months before July 1988. First, infrastructure. Kharg Island’s loading terminals were among the largest in the world, built to handle several million barrels a day.
From 1982 onward, Iraqi Air Force bombing campaigns hammered the Kharg terminals through years of sustained strikes on storage tanks, loading jetties and the shuttle tanker fleet. Iran improvised. Crude was loaded onto smaller tankers at Kharg, shuttled down the Gulf to Sirri and Larak islands at the outer edge of Iraqi strike range, then transferred to supertankers for export. The system kept oil moving, but at a fraction of pre-war capacity, at punishing logistical cost, and under continuous attack on the shuttle routes themselves. The Tanker War, which escalated from 1984 and eventually drew in the US Navy, was above all a war on Iran’s export revenue.
Second, price. Saudi Arabia’s decision to abandon production restraint triggered a global crash, from around thirty dollars a barrel in late 1985 to barely ten by the spring of 1986: a collapse of roughly two-thirds in a matter of months. For Iran, already exporting through damaged infrastructure at reduced volume, this was a compound catastrophe, with less oil getting out and each barrel worth less than half what it had fetched a year earlier.
Iraq suffered the same price shock, and its own Gulf terminals had been shut since early in the war. But new pipelines through Turkey and Saudi Arabia had brought most of its pre-war output back by 1987, and Iraq had backers with deep pockets and strategic reasons to keep writing cheques. The Gulf monarchies provided the bulk of Iraq’s external war financing; estimates of total Gulf Arab loans and grants range from thirty-seven to more than sixty billion dollars, with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE as the principal sources. They backed Iraq because they feared an Iranian victory would export the Islamic Revolution across the Gulf. Iran had no equivalent patron. Tehran was financing the fight largely from its own shrinking export revenue.
Third, weapons. Between 1986 and 1988, Moscow shipped Baghdad an estimated nine billion dollars’ worth of weapons, including some two thousand tanks and a steady supply of Scud missiles. It was the most intense period of Soviet military support during the entire conflict. Moscow feared an Iranian victory would export Islamic revolution into Soviet Central Asia, a concern sharpened by the decision to pull out of Afghanistan, and it used the arms pipeline as a hedge against that contagion.
The Soviet surge enabled Iraq’s final offensives. On April 17, 1988, Iraqi forces recaptured the al-Faw Peninsula, which Iran had held for two years, in about thirty-five hours. They deployed some hundred thousand troops, most of them Republican Guard, against perhaps fifteen thousand Iranian defenders, and drenched the Iranian lines with nerve and mustard gas. Iraq had fresh Soviet armour, air superiority and chemical weapons; Iran had depleted stocks it could no longer replace. The Iranian troops at al-Faw were outfought, but they were also outgunned, gassed and outspent.
The defeats of 1988 were real, but Iran surrendered no territory for good, and a run of lost battles became the end of the war because nothing lost could be replaced. Export revenue was gutted, oil infrastructure wrecked and hard currency spent, while the enemy’s resupply accelerated at the precise moment Iran’s was disintegrating. By the summer, Iran’s books no longer supported continued fighting.
The Vincennes question
On July 3, 1988, seventeen days before Khomeini's broadcast, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 aboard. Whether it was decisive is disputed. One reading treats it as a signal that the US would escalate involvement if the war continued; the other holds that the economic collapse was already determinative and the shootdown was an accelerant at most. The Iranian record is only partly open. Khomeini's own letter explaining the decision, released by Rafsanjani in 2006, cites his commanders' forecast of no victory within five years and a weak economy, but much of the wider deliberation remains off the record. The economic conditions for termination were in place before the shootdown, so whether it moved the timeline by days or weeks, the structural explanation holds independently of it.The calculated stop — Gulf War, 1991
Iran-Iraq was a forced termination — a government that wanted to continue fighting and couldn’t afford to. The 1991 Gulf War is the structural opposite: a deliberate stop, chosen by the winning side, because the anticipated cost of going further exceeded the anticipated return.
By late February 1991, the coalition had destroyed much of Iraq’s military capacity in Kuwait and badly mauled the Republican Guard, though large parts of it escaped across the Euphrates. The Bush administration decided not to push on to Baghdad.
The reasoning was documented with unusual candour by the people who made the call, and what they described was a judgment of costs against returns, weighing American lives, coalition politics and an occupation with no exit rather than territory and force ratios. Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary during the war, laid it out in a 1994 appearance at the American Enterprise Institute. Taking Baghdad, he warned, would leave the United States alone, occupying a country liable to fly apart: “It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.” The real question, he said, was “how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.”
George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft wrote in their 1998 memoir that going further would have meant being “forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.” They anticipated ethnic and sectarian fragmentation, the collapse of the multinational coalition, and a military commitment with no visible exit. Colin Powell shared the assessment. No strategy for ending the war was ever completed, let alone coordinated with plans and operations, because the war ended so fast that the principals improvised the cost-benefit analysis in real time. The people holding power judged that the expected cost of continuation outweighed everything continuation could buy.
In February 2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee that General Shinseki’s estimate of “several hundred thousand” troops for post-war Iraq was “wildly off the mark.” He asserted that Iraqi oil revenue would substantially offset reconstruction costs. In 1991, real uncertainty about costs produced restraint. In 2003, confident assumptions crowded out the calculation, and some of the very officials who had made the 1991 call, Cheney and Wolfowitz among them, now waved away the arithmetic they had once respected.
The 1991 ceasefire held in its essentials for twelve years. It was punctuated by no-fly-zone clashes and air strikes but never collapsed back into full-scale war. What kept it in place was the decision to stop, because stopping preserved the Iraqi state’s coercive apparatus, the structure that maintained internal order however brutally. The removal of that apparatus in 2003 produced the consequences the 1991 cost-benefit analysis had anticipated: sectarian collapse, insurgency, eight years of US military involvement, trillions of dollars spent, and a region destabilised for a generation.
The primary source
Bush and Scowcroft's memoir, A World Transformed, is unusually explicit for its genre. The two people who made the decision laid out their reasoning in detail, years before 2003 put it to the test. Time ran an excerpt as a sidebar in March 1998. Cheney, one architect of the 2003 invasion, had put the same case on tape four years earlier.Why ceasefires die
Getting a war to stop is one problem and keeping it stopped is another, and the research on the second starts with a number that was later revised sharply downward.
The economists Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler produced the headline number: shortly after a civil war ends, they estimated, countries face roughly a fifty percent risk of renewed conflict within five years. The figure entered UN documents, shaped the preparations for the Peacebuilding Commission, and became the number everyone cites in policy briefs and ministerial speeches. Two researchers, Astri Suhrke and Ingrid Samset, later showed that Collier’s own team had quietly revised the estimate to about twenty-three percent over four years, and that a simple count on the same data found a second war within five years in only about a quarter of cases. The revision was barely noticed. The fifty-percent figure still circulates in policy documents as though nobody ever questioned it.
The exact number matters less than the question it points toward. Whether the recurrence rate is twenty-five percent or fifty, what separates agreements that hold from those that collapse?
Barbara Walter, who studies how civil wars are settled, points to two conditions. The first is credible third-party security guarantees, which raise the immediate cost of defecting for both sides. The second is power-sharing arrangements that give former combatants a direct stake in the post-conflict order. Without outside enforcement, the commitment problem reasserts itself: the side that signed under duress waits for the balance to shift, and the side that extracted concessions has no mechanism to prevent it. Agreements incorporating more dimensions of power-sharing, whether political, territorial, military or economic, are significantly more durable. The implication cuts the other way too: a partial restructuring can disrupt existing arrangements without creating stable alternatives.
Taken provision by provision, the economic side of peace agreements tells a similar story. Private-goods provisions, such as reintegration funds, training and direct transfers to ex-combatants, made peace markedly more durable. Broad public-goods promises, the national development plans and general reconstruction commitments that look best in press conferences, mostly made no difference at all. The other provision that worked was fiscal federalism, which grants regions control over their own taxation and revenue.
Read together, these findings point the same way: agreements are more likely to fail when the financial architecture that made fighting rational survives the ceasefire, with resource competition, patronage networks, smuggling economies and elite revenue streams still intact after the signatures dry.
Suppose a warlord who controls a diamond mine signs a peace agreement. The agreement addresses the violence with ceasefire terms, demilitarised zones, perhaps a new constitution. But the warlord still controls the mine, the revenue stream that funded the militia still flows, and the fighters who staffed the militia still need income. The agreement addressed the shooting and left the shooting’s economic logic untouched.
That is a fair description of failed peace agreements from Sierra Leone and Liberia to the eastern Congo, South Sudan and Afghanistan. The resources differ (diamonds in Sierra Leone, coltan in the Congo, oil in South Sudan, opium in Afghanistan), but in each case the money that made the fighting rational outlived the ceasefire, and the fighting came back.
DDR — and why disarmament without economics doesn't work
Disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration programmes are the international community's standard tool for transitioning fighters to civilian life. The findings on private goods explain their poor track record: programmes that collect weapons without providing alternative livelihoods leave the economic incentive to remobilise intact. A former fighter with no income, no land and no prospects remains available to be recruited again.Sixty days in the strait — the Iran MOU against the checklist
Updated October 2026: the memorandum was signed on June 17 and had unravelled by August. As of October 2026, no replacement agreement has been reported.
In late May 2026, the contours of a proposed US-Iran memorandum of understanding became public through a series of leaks and official confirmations. The Strait of Hormuz would reopen, with shipping declared “unrestricted” and Iran given thirty days to clear the mines it had deployed. The US would lift its naval blockade on Iranian ports and issue sanctions waivers allowing Iran to sell oil freely, and the ceasefire would be extended by sixty days for talks. Iran, for its part, would negotiate over its nuclear programme, including the fate of roughly 440 kilograms of sixty-percent-enriched uranium, enough, if further enriched, for several nuclear weapons. That figure was the last estimate inspectors made, in June 2025; they had been unable to check it since. Iran would commit not to pursue nuclear weapons. A Lebanon-Hezbollah ceasefire provision was included, though its scope immediately became a point of contention between Tehran and Washington.
On June 1, Iranian state media announced that Tehran was suspending all communication with the US through intermediaries and vowed to completely block the Strait, citing Israeli military operations in Lebanon as ceasefire violations. The Lebanon dimension was itself a structural problem: Tehran insisted the ceasefire covered every front, Lebanon included; Israel kept striking Hezbollah regardless. The reported terms covered Lebanon, but Israel was not a party to them, which left each side free to read the ceasefire its own way, a gap that structural analysis would have predicted and that the June 1 suspension confirmed.
Hours later, Trump posted on Truth Social that talks were “continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” On June 17 the two sides signed the memorandum electronically: a sixty-day ceasefire extension, a gradual reopening of the strait, the lifting of the US blockade and waivers for Iranian oil sales. It did not survive the summer. Disputes over who controlled the shipping lanes and who could charge for passage stalled implementation, Iran fired on ships it said had strayed from its permitted route, and US strikes resumed in late June. By mid-August the strait was again closed to ships without Iranian approval, the US blockade was back, and Trump was saying that no talks were even scheduled.
What the deal got right was its target. The Strait reopening and sanctions waivers went straight at export revenue.
Under its reported terms, Iran’s short-term economic position would have improved substantially. Oil would flow and hard currency return, easing the immediate fiscal pressure. In Fearon’s terms, compliance became the better short-term bet. A ceasefire that demands concessions without delivering economic return creates no incentive to comply; the published draft offered a real carrot: oil-export waivers from the day of signing, access to frozen funds, and the promise of a reconstruction plan worth at least $300 billion once a final deal was done.
Its weaknesses lay elsewhere. First, it did not address the economic interests of the IRGC.
Estimates credit companies and organisations tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with anywhere from a third to two-thirds of Iran’s GDP, a range that itself shows how opaque the system is. The researcher Kayhan Valadbaygi calculates the share of the wider military-bonyad complex, the Guards together with the revolutionary foundations, at more than half of Iran’s GDP in 2013. The IRGC built its economic empire on the back of Western sanctions. Sanctions eliminated non-IRGC competition for import channels and domestic markets, and they consolidated the Guards’ control over smuggling networks, parallel banking, and what Tehran calls the “resistance economy.” A 2006 Supreme Leader decree under Article 44 of the constitution ordered eighty percent of the shares in large state companies sold off to the private and cooperative sectors. In practice, much of what was “privatised” went to semi-state buyers such as pension funds, bonyads and IRGC-linked conglomerates, extending their reach across construction, telecoms, energy, banking, and import-export.
The structural problem is that normalisation of international trade threatens the IRGC’s monopoly position. Open the economy to foreign competition and the sanctions-era advantages of captive markets, smuggling margins and parallel finance erode. Iran’s 2025-26 budget bill earmarked fifty-one percent of the government’s share of oil and gas export revenues, around twelve billion euros, for the armed forces, the IRGC included. An institution receiving a guaranteed share of oil revenue has a material interest in controlling the terms on which that revenue flows, and a strong interest in resisting any arrangement that would dilute its share or open the channels through which it operates.
The sanctions that weakened Iran’s economy strengthened the IRGC’s share of it. The MOU changed the national cost-benefit calculation. It did not change the calculation for the faction with the most capacity to sabotage compliance, whose financial interests normalisation threatens. The result was an agreement that looked rational at the national level but could be undermined by actors whose economic incentives diverge from the national interest.
Second, it packed the most politically explosive concession into a sixty-day negotiating window, extendable only if both sides agreed. Iran’s nuclear programme is at once its most powerful international leverage and its most charged domestic symbol. The hardline factions that hold real power, namely the IRGC, the security establishment and the office of the Supreme Leader, derive political legitimacy specifically from nuclear defiance. Whether oil revenue now and a reconstruction fund later are a large enough economic incentive to offset the domestic political cost of nuclear concessions is a question the MOU’s architecture could not answer. If the recurrence research is a guide, economic incentives work when they are sustained and structural, not when the immediate payoff is real but everything structural is deferred to a final deal that still has to be negotiated.
Third, the MOU as published left untouched the financial architecture that would survive the ceasefire: it had no post-agreement mechanism for integrating non-IRGC economic actors into international markets and made no structural change to the patronage networks the sanctions-evasion economy sustains. In the civil wars above, surviving networks of that kind are where agreements came apart.
Any agreement that leaves the IRGC’s economic interests untouched faces a faction with a motive and the means to undermine it. The memorandum’s collapse fits that prediction without proving it. Whether that is what unravelled the deal, the public record does not show.
The JCPOA precedent
The 2015 nuclear deal is the closest available test case for what happens when Iran enters a normalisation agreement. After it took effect in January 2016, sanctions relief arrived: oil exports rose, GDP jumped by close to nine percent that year, and foreign contracts worth billions materialised. But IRGC economic dominance was not significantly reduced. The bonyad system remained intact, and parallel import networks kept running. The deal began to unravel in 2018 when the US withdrew, and in July 2019 Iran started exceeding its nuclear limits. The structural question is whether the IRGC would have hollowed it out from within regardless. Persistent IRGC market dominance despite normalisation, and continued bonyad expansion into newly opened sectors, show that relief alone did not loosen the Guards' hold. Whether they would have turned that hold against the deal cannot be known.In July 1988, Brent crude sold for about fifteen dollars a barrel. Soviet weapons were crossing into Iraq faster than Tehran could buy anything to counter them, and Iran’s hard-currency reserves were functionally spent. A government that had measured its commitment in martyrs had run out of the money to keep fighting.
This time the oil was supposed to flow again, and the faction with the most to lose from normalisation still held the means to stop it.
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Media
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