By Mike Nelson
Tuesday, June 16, 2026
After a week of pure confusion, mixed messages, and wild
fluctuation between military strikes by both sides and promises of imminent
peace, President Donald Trump abruptly announced Thursday that Iran and the United States
were inches away from a memorandum of understanding that would, at a minimum,
codify a cessation in hostilities, open maritime traffic through the contested
Strait of Hormuz, and set conditions for later negotiations about the Iranian
nuclear program. He went on to specify
the agreement would be formalized in a signing ceremony to be attended by Vice
President J.D. Vance on Sunday, June 14, coincidentally Trump’s 80th
birthday, a conflict that apparently would have prevented the president from
attending the signing himself.
Rather than clarify matters, this statement led to
further confusion, in part because of a long history of administration
dishonesty and hyperbole about the Iran war and in part because of the tumult
in subsequent days. What was announced as a formal ceremony in Europe shifted
to plans to e-sign the document, and then—as late as Sunday afternoon—it seemed
there was no agreement at all. Grossly misaligned characterizations of the
terms of the agreement, followed by resumed Israeli strikes against Hezbollah, threatened to
collapse whatever discussions were taking place.
Finally, on Sunday evening, just prior to Trump’s
UFC-themed birthday party, the White House made
it official, announcing there was an agreement. Pakistani Prime Minister
Shehbaz Sharif specified the agreement would be formalized at a ceremony
on Friday—an announcement further confirmed by Iranian sources.
Trump—with all the exuberance of Michael Scott declaring
bankruptcy and apparently the same level of impact—posted, “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of
the Strait of Hormuz.” Then, in a clear indication of the gap between the
president’s desire for omnipotence and the realities of events, followed up that the strait would actually open “upon the
signing of the Deal on Friday.” Adding to this confusion, Vice President J.D.
Vance told Good Morning America on Monday morning that the memorandum
was actually e-signed the night before. The administration should get on the
same sheet of music as to whether the deal has been signed or hasn’t, and
whether key portions of it are in effect yet or are not—but why should we
expect that a team that hasn't been consistent throughout the war could be so
now?
Regardless of whether the effective date of the ceasefire
is 24 hours past or a week in the future, the elephant in the room remains:
What has been agreed to? Despite assurances of an incredible deal from members
of the administration and their surrogates, the White House seems reluctant to
release the actual text of the memorandum.
If the deal has in fact been finalized, and potentially
even signed as Vance suggests, the administration's unwillingness to share the
details suggests the terms are, as many have feared, tantamount to a surrender.
Why not transparently share something of which you are proud?
Instead of letting the agreement stand on its own, the
administration has gone on a full-court press to characterize it as a success
and is arguably failing in that characterization. In his Good Morning
America interview, Vance said, “What this agreement does is really
twofold—on the one hand, it ensures that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon,
while simultaneously opening the Strait of Hormuz.” Regardless of what else
comes out of the deal, which will almost assuredly be the portions that benefit
Iran and of which the White House is too embarrassed to release now, these two
“achievements” seem to be what we have to show for the war—and neither is an
achievement in any quantifiable way.
The vice president is not the only administration
official to try to spin the first element as some kind of major win. On Face
the Nation Sunday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, “The document
says Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won't seek one, won't buy one,
won't have one.” But this is nothing new. This Iranian assurance seems to be,
verbatim, the same promise enshrined in the JCPOA, which stated, “Iran
reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire
any nuclear weapons.”
These words were hollow and meaningless when Iran
provided them in 2015, and we have no reason to suspect they are offered now
with any greater level of sincerity. In fact, the administration has spent the
past year rightly characterizing the Iranian regime as duplicitous, yet it now
wants the American people to find a newfound faith in its forthrightness and
trustworthiness. When the Obama administration took the mullahs’ assurances at
face value, it did so based on the naïveté that Iran could and should be a
responsible actor in the Middle East. Now the Trump administration seems to
take the Iranians at their word not out of earnest belief but out of a cynical
willingness to accept the deceit in order to pass it on to a domestic audience
growing frustrated with their ineptitude.
As to the second point, reopening of the Strait of Hormuz
will relieve the economic and political pressure facing the president by
freeing the flow of 20 percent of the world’s energy supplies and potentially
calming market concerns over further volatility. But it’s worth noting that
this condition existed on February 27, prior to the president's initiation of
combat operations.
In other words, the portions of the agreement the
administration points to with pride are not gains at all, just a return to status
quo ante bellum and a meaningless pinky promise.
While these are—in the White House’s eyes apparently—the
brag-worthy portions of the MOU, there is greater concern for what is not being
said. Iranian media have reported various types of economic benefits, from the lifting of oil sanctions to the
unfreezing of Iranian assets to direct payments for wartime damages to the
potential for tolls on international shipping after the 60-day period,
all of which should be taken with a grain of salt. But while the administration
tries to describe any of these as “performance-based” measures that require
Iranian compliance first, the lack of specificity suggests, as is reported and
seemingly confirmed by Vance, that the total benefit will dwarf the
$1.7 billion Iran received under the JCPOA, about which Trump has railed
against Obama for years. One can understand why the White House is delaying
news of concessions to Iran that outstrip by orders of magnitude those the
president has mocked as weak.
Part of the legitimate and correct criticism of the JCPOA
was that it front-loaded incentives and rewards for Iran while delaying the
implementation of measures to address American and international security
concerns. The new agreement sets forth a 60-day timeline to negotiate the
disposition of the Iranian nuclear program. President Trump told the New York Times that if an agreement is not reached
at the end of that period, he would resume military action. Like many things
Trump says, I do not believe he has any intent of following through, and it is
likely the Iranians do not view this as a credible threat either. They have
watched time and time again as Trump threatened a resumption of military
strikes when they failed to meet diplomatic benchmarks, only for him to “TACO”
predictably. Moreover, the Iranians have calendars and a keen awareness of
American politics. Sixty days after June 19 is August 18, or, said another way,
only 77 days before the midterms. The chances of Trump resuming an unpopular
war and causing economic disruption right before what is already likely to be a
catastrophic “thumping” for his party in Congress are not zero, but they are
awfully close. We will be going into these nuclear discussions having
surrendered all our leverage: Even the threat of snapback sanctions could
trigger Iran’s resumed disruption in the strait.
So now we wait to see what is in the actual memorandum,
fully confident that if the portions the administration feels are worthy of
hyping seem pretty dismal even through the spin, what will be revealed in the
coming days will be inherently worse. There’s also the potential that whatever
is agreed in this memorandum will be all that we get, with no future agreement
on the enriched uranium or limitations on Iranian nuclear research beyond the
single line hollow promise. Not only does there seem to be no agreement about
severing Iran from its proxy militias, as the White House had repeatedly
claimed was a goal of the war, but the deal provides an umbrella of protection
over Hezbollah that, combined with America’s scolding of Israel for strikes
against the Iranian proxy, suggests the opposite. And, of course, for the
Iranian people, there will be none of the promised help on the way.
I await the actual language of the memorandum to assess
just how bad it is—with a potential range between merely objectionable to truly
disastrous. But I feel confident this isn’t a matter of assessing whether the
glass is glass half-full or half-empty. The glass is likely 90 percent empty.
The way this war ends was baked into the confusion in which it started. Trump
was never clear about his exact reasons for going to war or what conditions he
was trying to achieve. Without any fixed variables, he was failing, and the
desire to end the crisis of his own creation, under any circumstances, became
the only goal.
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