The United States carried out military strikes against Iranian targets on June 27, 2026, after accusing Iran of violating a memorandum of understanding signed on June 17, 2026. On the same day, Iran conducted strikes against targets in Bahrain and Kuwait. Both nations accused each other of breaching the terms of the memorandum.

Following the exchanges on June 27, the United States and Iran agreed to "stand down" before financial markets opened. Iran also issued a threat to withdraw completely from negotiations if the United States continued its attacks.

The memorandum of understanding, signed by the United States and Iran on June 17, includes participation from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. Vice President JD Vance has worked to promote the memorandum to the American public.

Annelle Sheline, a research fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said, "We see this sort of model whereby Israel gets to keep firing, and yet the rest of the world sort of agrees to still call it a ceasefire." She added, "That's what Israel did to Lebanon, that's what Israel has done to Gaza since October, and I certainly agree that it seems plausible that we would have something similar playing out between the U.S. and Iran." Sheline also stated, "It seems very unlikely that Trump would commit ground troops and if Israel can't get that, which it was hoping for, a low-boil conflict where they're preventing the U.S. from reaching some kind of modus operandi moving forward or allowing Iran to normalize, is kind of their least worst option." Regarding funding, Sheline said, "Americans have made it quite clear that they do not want to continue to finance what Israel is doing, whether it is in Palestine or elsewhere in the region." She further noted, "This NDAA is very likely to enact this integration of the U.S. and Israeli defense industrial bases and move American funding from the category of funds that Congress votes on every year, to just another part of the Pentagon procurement process, which basically removes it from visibility."

Khury Petersen-Smith, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies' New Internationalism Project, said, "The U.S. launches a set of military operations that begin with these spectacular large-scale operations that are what usually come to mind when you think about a war, like the shock and awe operation in the invasion of Iraq." He continued, "And then, like in both Afghanistan and Iraq, they declare early victories of certain sorts, but then continue to involve themselves as these ongoing conflicts become much more complicated and the war just becomes really vague." Petersen-Smith also stated, "Trump began last year with bombing Somalia, and then Yemen again for a few weeks, and then joining Israel for a day in the war last summer, and then Nigeria and the air strikes in the Caribbean." He added, "There's been this kind of onslaught from the Pentagon that all comes in the context of the two-plus decades of the war on terror."

In a separate action, the USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. fired a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile on February 28, 2026. This missile strike was conducted in support of Operation Epic Fury.