I am the special envoy for the ceasefire. In June we announced the immediate and permanent termination of this war on all fronts. It is August. The war is on again, and I have never had more work, because in my line of work permanent is a renewable term. People misunderstand what I do. They think my product is peace. My product is the talks. Peace is what happens when the talks end, and the talks ending is the one outcome I am paid to prevent. Here is the summer, because the summer is the whole business model. In April we reached a framework. A framework is a ceasefire you can be proud of without having to keep. In June we upgraded it to a memorandum, 14 points, signed, with a 60-day window. I want you to admire the 60-day window. We wrote the expiration date into the peace. We agreed to stop fighting for exactly as long as it would take to schedule the next reason to start. The June deal used the word permanent. Both capitals said it from the podium. Immediate and permanent termination, on all fronts. It held for about 3 weeks, which in this field is a strong quarter. When it collapsed, I was not disappointed. A collapse is a lead. The moment the June deal ended, my phone filled with mediators, because a broken ceasefire is the only thing that generates demand for a new one. Oman offered a room. Qatar offered a room. Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey offered rooms. There is never a shortage of rooms. That is the deepest fact of my industry: the supply of people willing to host the end of a war is effectively infinite, and it is refreshed every time the war does not end. By late July we had a new proposal. A 10-day truce, to revive the deal that revived the framework. Nobody accepted it, which was ideal, because an unaccepted proposal is a proposal you get to make again. Here is the part I am least modest about. When I speak, the price of oil moves. The June deal took about $31 off a barrel of Brent. The morning it was declared over, one sentence put Brent up more than 6% in a day. There are heads of state who cannot move a market like that. I move it with a press release about a war I am not fighting. And here is the part other people are now looking into. In March and April, someone placed roughly $7 billion in bets that oil would fall, and the bets kept landing in the minutes before the ceasefires were announced. Not the hours. The minutes. About $2.2 billion of it went out in the single minute before one announcement, and crude then fell as much as 15%, one of the largest intraday drops on record. Another $830 million was sold 15 minutes before I extended a ceasefire. The people who counted it noted that a seller that size could have cleared hundreds of millions in profit. The prediction markets were smaller and less shy. Three anonymous accounts made more than $600,000 correctly calling the month of the April ceasefire, and one of them turned $13,200 into $467,515, which is a 35-fold return on the single question of when I would announce peace. Regulators and the Justice Department are now looking into who seemed to know the schedule of peace before peace was scheduled. I do not know who it was. Neither, yet, do they. I will only say this: they believed my announcement was coming, and they were right, which is more faith than either capital ever showed in the deal. After every round we announce significant progress. I need you to hear that phrase the way I hear it. Significant progress is progress that is significant precisely because it has not arrived. The day it arrives, the war is over, the rooms empty, the mediators fly home, and I am a man with a passport and no reason to use it. So we make significant progress, carefully, in the amount that is large enough to report and small enough to survive. There is one thing that is never in my briefing, and it is the thing the briefing is about. My briefing has the venue, the point count, the window, the phrase for the podium. It does not have the person under the fighting the ceasefire is meant to stop. That person is the demand. I do not meet the demand. I meet the mediators, in the rooms, about the demand, and I call the meeting progress. So no, the ceasefire is not failing. A ceasefire that held would be a ceasefire that ended, and a war that ended would be a market that closed. What you are watching is not a peace process breaking down. It is a peace process working, at the only speed that keeps it a process. We will announce the permanent end of this war again next month. I already have the room. Permanence, in my trade, is a standing reservation. I renew it the morning after it lapses. Good foundation. Significant progress. On all fronts.