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The deal’s implementation now has four working groups, Sanctions Termination, Nuclear Affairs, Reconstruction, and Monitoring, plus two coordination mechanisms for Lebanon and Hormuz demining. Reading the architecture reveals the gap: there is no working group for strait governance. The waterway the crisis was about got a demining mechanism and nothing else. The basket post asked to decouple the strait; instead it was dropped. This post argues for the fifth working group, the one the strait actually needs.

The deal includes a $300 billion Reconstruction and Development Fund — a private investment vehicle, over half committed, replacing Iran’s original $400 billion war-damage demand. Read against the crisis, the fund is the legitimate alternative to the Hormuz toll: it supplies the reconstruction capital the toll was meant to extract, by investment rather than by taxing global trade. If the fund fills, the economic rationale for the toll evaporates — strengthening the case for a minimal service fee. But Gulf hesitation is the fault line.