Iran's last ceasefire cleared its top security body by 12 votes to 1 and still collapsed, and one reason the Associated Press names is a release of frozen assets that never arrived

Twelve votes to one.

That was the margin by which Iran's Supreme National Security Council approved the April ceasefire with the United States, according to an Associated Press account of the Iranian leadership published early on Sunday and reported from Cairo by Amir-hussein Radjy and Lee Keath. The approving majority included senior figures in the Revolutionary Guard and the regular military. The agreement collapsed anyway.

That number is the most useful thing available tonight to anyone trying to price a weekend social media post.

This desk reported hours ago that President Donald Trump had described an open Strait of Hormuz as something an emerging deal would include, in the future conditional, and that Iran had said nothing publicly. The question left open was what a parameter is worth. The April vote is a partial answer, and it is not an encouraging one: something very close to consensus inside the Iranian system has already been reached once in this war, and it did not hold.

Why it did not hold

The Associated Press gives two reasons, and only one of them is military. The ceasefire crumbled as the two sides traded strikes and as Iran pressed for control over passage through the strait. It also reports that Iran was frustrated that financial promises under the deal, among them the release of billions in frozen assets, did not materialise, and that the American blockade is now back in place.

That second reason is the one a financial reader should mark. The weekend announcement names an open strait and an end to the nuclear threat. It does not mention assets.

On the internal politics, the reporting describes unity on prosecuting the war and a sharp split over how it should end. On one side is the Paydari movement, Persian for stability, whose adherents oppose negotiations with the United States. On the other are supporters of President Masoud Pezeshkian and the parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who also serves as Iran's chief negotiator, and who treat military pressure as a means to a negotiated settlement. An adviser to Qalibaf, Mahdi Mohammadi, wrote on his Telegram channel on Thursday that negotiation is "a political tool and a complement to military action," according to the Associated Press.

Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, told the news agency that with no benefits having arrived from the April deal there is "no serious division" over how to respond now.

Where the new supreme leader stands is not established. Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei was reportedly injured in the strike that killed his father in the opening minutes of the war on 28 February, and the Associated Press reports that he remains in hiding and that both camps have claimed his support.

What the strait actually carries

The transit numbers in this brief come from the Energy Information Administration analysis linked above rather than from the wire copy, and the two do not quite agree. The agency puts Hormuz flows at more than one quarter of total global seaborne traded oil across 2022 and the first half of 2023, with around one fifth of global liquefied natural gas trade transiting in 2022. Oil flow averaged 21 million barrels a day in 2022, about 21 percent of world petroleum liquids consumption.

These are pre-war figures. The most recent EIA chokepoint analysis available carries a publication date of 21 November 2023, so it describes the strait as it was, not as it is under a blockade, and it is offered here as a baseline rather than as a current reading.

One further figure bears on how much relief an opening would actually deliver. Only Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates operate pipelines that can bypass the strait, and the agency estimated around 3.5 million barrels a day of effective unused bypass capacity against the 21 million that moved through it. Iran's own Goreh-Jask line, rated at 0.3 million barrels a day, has gone unused since a single export cargo in July 2021.

There is no public document recording the Supreme National Security Council vote, the composition of the factions, or the two occasions on which Iranian state television is reported to have cut away from officials discussing talks with Washington. All of that rests on the credited reporting above, and it is said here rather than left for a reader to assume.