Lack of a methodology

Is there a well-established methodology for negotiating a ceasefire and managing incidents that may arise? There should be one, but the years 2025 and 2026 have shown above all that negotiated ceasefires are a complete mess. We live in an era of leaders with rather limited cultural awareness who also claim to know everything, all while doing whatever comes to mind.

The result? No ceasefire holds—nor could any ever hold.

• The ceasefire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza in October 2025 isn’t really considered a ceasefire. It has transformed an all-out war into a low-intensity conflict. There is no system to monitor the ceasefire, and Israel continues to do as it pleases and carry out bombings under various pretexts. It’s better than before, but the population remains in a worrying state with limited prospects for improvement.
• The June 2026 ceasefire between the United States and Iran did not last long. The June 17, 2026, protocol was torpedoed by Iran when it launched military attacks against several ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. This was the work of Iranian opponents of the signed agreement. Had there been a system in place to monitor the ceasefire negotiated as part of the June 17 protocol, the initial incident involving the violation of the agreement could have been contained. This was not the case. At the first sign of trouble, the United States provoked an escalation—which itself constituted a violation—and effectively buried the agreement. The agreement was therefore so fragile that an unidentified Iranian actor was able to bring it to an end. If there had been a clear methodology or even a modicum of common sense, they would have managed to overcome such incidents. That was not the case. Once again, this war continues, even if it is no longer a full-scale war. The war continues to spread with the Houthi-Saudi Arabia conflict.
• The plan to maintain a ceasefire between Russia and Ukrain with a coalition of volunteers will not amount to much. To claim that simply gathering soldiers and military units on the ground is enough to put an end to all incidents seems naïve. What is needed is to transform this expression of collective goodwill into a system for monitoring the ceasefire. The parties involved do not seem to have learned any lessons from the long period of ceasefire that preceded the Russia-Ukraine war of February 2025.

Write What We Know

Kissinger said that a leader can, at best, only process material at the “Reader’s Digest” level. It has to be simple and short. If it’s too complex and too long, they’ll never read it or understand it.

It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it sets a goal: to write what we know as simply as possible, in the hope that it will be read and understood.

That, then, is the goal of this series on ceasefires, which will be expanded, article by article, in the coming weeks, in the hope that it will be useful for implementing ceasefires that hold.

September 17, 2026

Naej DRANER (naej.draner@gmail.com)