Memorandum of Misunderstanding

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

The first thing they teach you in law school is that a valid contract requires a “meeting of the minds.”

 

That is, the parties must have a common understanding of what each is obliged to do. That’s why the terms are written down, of course—to ensure that the signatories are on the same page (literally) with respect to their rights and obligations. There is no agreement unless there’s, you know, an agreement.

 

Yesterday the White House announced that the United States and Iran had at last negotiated a memorandum of understanding to end the war between them. Finally, after 38 false alarms, there’s an agreement!

 

It’s just that there’s no, you know, agreement.

 

To begin with, the written document laying out the terms is being treated as a state secret on par with the nuclear codes. Trump-loving Iran hawks like Mark Levin have been reduced to begging the administration to publish the accord so that Americans can see what their government has agreed to.

 

“Maybe there was a handshake deal with a written instrument to follow,” you might say. Could be, in which case we’re forced for the moment to rely on the parties’ accounts of the terms. But that’s a problem in this particular instance of a “meeting of the minds,” as the minds on both sides happen to belong to completely unreliable sociopaths.

 

In this case, when one party claims that the deal requires X and the other insists it requires not-X, there’s no way to feel confident about which is telling the truth. “American credibility has deteriorated to the point where the president can announce a diplomatic agreement and the near-universal reaction is ‘let’s wait for confirmation from Tasnim,’” a reporter from The Economist snarked, referring to an Iranian state media outlet.

 

It was just a week into the war, remember, when Donald Trump stated “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Based on what we know about the bargain he struck this weekend, not only has Iran not surrendered unconditionally, it’s surrendered hardly anything at all. What was the president’s pledge worth? What is American credibility worth in 2026?

 

In the first hours of the war on February 28, the Washington Post asked Trump what his goals were. “All I want is freedom for the people,” he replied. That was consistent with what he said during the mass demonstrations that swept the country in January, when he urged Iranians to keep protesting and vowed that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” Iran’s threat to America can’t be neutralized without replacing the Khomeinist regime and the president seemed to understand that.

 

After the deal to end the war was announced on Sunday, he walked it all back. “As far as regime change, I never cared about regime change,” he glibly told the Wall Street Journal. “This is the third group [of Iranian leaders] we’ve dealt with, and this is the most rational group yet.” That is emphatically not true, but this is what you get when the person dictating U.S. foreign policy is a pathological liar whose highest priority in any situation is to convince observers that he’s come out ahead.

 

His words mean nothing. The Iranians’ words mean nothing. Good luck to all of us in trying to decipher who’s telling the truth as the two sides set about contradicting each other on even the most basic terms of the deal.

 

Uncertainty.

 

The tone was set on Sunday when the president triumphantly announced the deal on Truth Social, declaring, “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz…. Ships of the World, start your engines.” Minor problem: The deal won’t be formally signed until Friday, forcing him to publish a second post clarifying that the Ships of the World will need to wait a few more days.

 

It felt like a bad sign that Trump himself seemed not to know that basic detail. And it was.

 

If there’s any element of the agreement whose terms should be clear and undisputed, it’s the reopening of the strait. That’s supposed to happen up front, by all accounts, with the U.S. relaxing its blockade of Iranian ports simultaneously. The two countries will then spend 60 days negotiating a long-term agreement on Iran’s nuclear program and economic relief, but one might reasonably assume that disposition of the strait has already been settled if shipping is set to resume as soon as next weekend.

 

It hasn’t. Trump told the New York Times on Sunday that commerce will be “permanently toll-free” in the strait hereafter but Iranian media claims it will be toll-free only during the 60-day negotiating period. Thereafter, according to a foreign ministry spokesman, Iran intends to collect “fees” related to “navigation services, environmental protection, potentially ship insurance, and other services” from transiting vessels in coordination with Oman.

 

When J.D. Vance was asked about that discrepancy in an interview this morning, he claimed that the fate of the strait will also be settled during the 60-day period. “Our expectation is that the strait is going to be opened in a toll-free way for the long term,” he told CNBC, “and that’s the sort of thing that we’re going to figure out in these technical negotiations.”

 

If there’s been no meeting of the minds yet about a matter as elementary as how the Strait of Hormuz will operate, in what way does this contract exist?

 

Another elementary question: Does the deal cover Lebanon?

 

The answer is surprisingly “murky,” per the Times, despite the fact that this subject has more potential than any other to wreck the deal’s implementation. Iran wants the U.S. to agree that fighting should cease on all fronts, which would make further Israeli attacks on Hezbollah off-limits. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told the president that he won’t abide by terms restricting his ability to target the group, and far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir flatly declared that “Trump’s agreement does not bind us.”

 

It’s trivially easy to imagine the deal being signed on Friday, Hezbollah attacking Israel the next day, Israel responding, and Iran immediately closing the strait again in protest. An agreement that grants an Iranian proxy a de facto veto over its implementation is not an agreement in any meaningful sense.

 

More uncertainty: What will happen to Iran’s ballistic missile program, a key prewar White House concern due to its alleged potential to threaten the mainland United States? A former Netanyahu aide who spoke to the Times was surprised by the fact that the publicly known elements of the deal say nothing about it.

 

What will happen if the regime starts massacring Iranian protesters again? Trump seems to think the agreement would halt sanctions relief and the release of further frozen assets in that scenario. What about access for nuclear inspectors? He believes the deal will allow them near-instant passage into the country, unlike the long, torturous negotiations for inspections in years past.

 

But why he believes any of that isn’t clear. “Mr. Trump seemed to be describing Iranian concessions that the country has not yet made, or that have been kicked to the follow-up negotiations,” the Times observed.

 

How about money? The White House has apparently approved the release of $25 billion in frozen Iranian funds as part of the agreement, dwarfing the amount that Iran received under Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. For a sum that vast, one might think the regime would be required to fulfill certain obligations before the cash goes out the door. After all, the only thing worse than enriching the Khomeinists would be enriching them in exchange for nothing.

 

But it’s not clear that there’s been any meeting of the minds about that either, as an Iranian diplomatic official says the country won’t participate in the 60-day negotiating phase until it gets its frozen assets. According to Reuters, it’s already gotten some: The United Arab Emirates has forked over $3 billion and might be prepared to release $20 billion in all.

 

Does Iran have any duties under this contract that it’s obliged to perform before getting paid, or is this a “cash up front” deal in which we simply trust Islamist fanatics to hold up their end of the bargain? Does the president even know?

 

The only certainty, it seems, is that both parties will tentatively begin to relax their chokeholds on the strait this weekend. From there things will proceed just as they’ve proceeded for the past two months, with the two sides struggling to reach compromises that are tolerable to the hardliners in each of their respective bases.

 

Rather than a “peace agreement,” think of what’s happening this week as the U.S. and its allies paying Iran a bribe of some unknown but significant magnitude in return for immediate—and necessary—relief for oil markets. Everything else is up in the air, functionally unchanged.

 

If there’s little certainty about the minutiae of the deal, though, there’s much more certainty about the fallout from it.

 

Certainty.

 

In the first place, many Iran hawks are certain to cook up a scapegoat for this failure to avoid pitting themselves against Trump.

 

Sen. Lindsey Graham showed the way on Sunday after the deal was announced. “Under our law, any nuclear deal with Iran will be sent to Congress for review and a vote,” he wrote. “I look forward to reviewing the final product and I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress.”

 

Vice President Vance? Vice President Vance isn’t in charge of this process. The guy who fancies himself history’s greatest dealmaker is. Blaming Vance is pitiful “good czar, bad boyars” logic of the sort that right-wing cowards like Graham have been using for 10 years to shift blame for the president’s stupidity onto less threatening political actors around him. It’s a raw deal for J.D., but oh well. No one forced him to join this garbage party.

 

I’m also certain that Congress won’t take up the nuclear deal, Graham’s tough talk notwithstanding. The Senate surely lacks the two-thirds majority needed to ratify this agreement and Graham lacks the courage to force a vote on it, knowing how its defeat would humiliate Trump. Some connivance will occur to spare Republicans from having to approve it, as happened in 2015 when Barack Obama’s nuclear pact was deemed non-binding and therefore not technically a treaty requiring Senate approval.

 

I’m frankly surprised that Trump agreed to put the agreement in writing at all. Maybe he had no choice, but doing so cuts against his lust for unaccountability. Instinctively he’d much prefer to have an understanding with Iran whose terms only he and his advisers know, so that he alone gets to decide when and whether to enforce it as political circumstances require. You can’t be accused of having made a bad deal if no one but you and the other party knows what’s in it, right?

 

Another certainty is that Iran will have all the leverage in these negotiations going forward.

 

I’m tempted to predict that the 60-day negotiating period will bring another 38 false alarms about a final deal being near, but the opposite is more likely to be true. The president is done talking about this war, I suspect, because the president is done with this conflict, period. Gas prices and inflation are up and his job approval is down, which explains why simply returning to the prewar status quo in the strait was America’s key goal in stage one. Trump would just as soon forget that the whole thing happened and everyone, especially the Iranians, knows it.

 

And because they know it, they’re now emboldened to drive the hardest of bargains in reaching a final agreement. They recognize that the president will bend over backward to avoid resuming the conflict, especially as the midterms draw closer. That means Trump being more generous with concessions to reach a final agreement—especially once Americans stop paying attention—and ignoring violations along the way by Iran and its proxies to whatever extent he feasibly can.

 

The president’s vanity will also align him psychologically with the Iranians, his new partners in peace. Having staked so much of his credibility on the deal they struck, he’ll feel compelled to preserve and defend it to critics even when Iran or Hezbollah does something to make him look like a chump. He’ll end up behaving like an Iranian ally, making excuses for their transgressions and eventually dangling more normal diplomatic relations if they’re willing to build on their agreement by cooperating further with the U.S.

 

Which leads to one more certainty: For Israel’s relationship with the president and with America, it’s all downhill from here.

 

Sunday morning brought a sneak preview of how Trump will behave toward the Jewish state once he’s bound to Iran by a deal. For the second time in a week, he flipped his wig when Israel retaliated against a Hezbollah attack by striking Beirut; in this case, however, with the announcement of a peace agreement hours away, he seemed to take the Israelis’ reprisal personally. Didn’t they realize they were spoiling his big moment?

 

“It is so bad—I couldn’t believe it. An hour before we are supposed to sign the deal,” he complained to Axios. “Why did Bibi have to do a f—ing attack? I was so pissed off. I let him know. He has no f—ing judgment. I let him know that.” An Iranian state news outlet reported that the White House was so frantic to avert an Iranian military response to Israel that it agreed to add last-minute concessions to the deal, “including speeding up the end of the naval blockade.”

 

I believe it. Israel is finding out, and will yet find out, how miserable it is to be at odds with Donald Trump when he has leverage over you. The Iranians, over whom he has little, will get carrots from him to ensure their compliance in months to come. Israel, a client state, will get sticks—private threats, angry presidential rants, and warnings that it should learn to live with “very small and meaningless” attacks by its enemies if it wants continued American support.

 

Inevitably Hezbollah, with Iran’s backing, will attack the Jewish state again and Netanyahu will face the terrible choice of ignoring it to please the president or hitting back and risking a full rupture with the White House. All U.S. allies eventually learn that Trump’s patronage requires them to place his political interests above their national interests. Israel will learn the hard way.

 

So when we ask whether there really is a “memorandum of understanding” between the U.S. and Iran, the answer ultimately has to be: An understanding as to what? On the particulars of how postwar Iran will be allowed to project power, there’s no understanding at all. But on America’s need to invest in gaining and keeping Iran’s cooperation for at least the rest of Trump’s presidency, we have a meeting of the minds at last.