The “Memorandum of Understanding”

I understood that Trump was going to make public the “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) that laid out the framework for a peace deal between the U.S. and Iran, and was even going to read it aloud on television. That apparently didn’t happen, and if you look for the text of the MoU on the Internet, you see several versions. For example, the one I put below—the most comprehensive one I’ve seen—comes from Bloomberg News, but there are different versions at the NY Post and MEMRI.

Here’s from Bloomberg:

Below is the text of the 14-point draft memorandum, as seen by Bloomberg News.

The MoU as given by the NY Post: note that it differs in some respects from what’s above:

The following 12 points were first revealed by Axios reporter Barak Ravid, who also works for the Israeli channel. The document has previously been described as a 14-point agreement.

• Iran, the US and their allies would stop fighting across the region — including in Lebanon.
• Tehran would reaffirm its pledge never to build a nuclear weapon.
• The US and Iran would work out what happens to Tehran’s enriched uranium stockpile.
• Both sides would open talks on Iran’s future enrichment activities and nuclear needs.
• Iran would maintain the “status quo” of its nuclear program — which has been largely decimated — while negotiations continue.
• The US would lift its naval blockade, hold off on new sanctions and refrain from sending more troops to the region.
• Iran would guarantee safe, toll-free passage for commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days.
• Washington would release an unspecified amount of frozen Iranian assets once the MOU takes effect.
• A final deal reached after the 60 days would see the US withdraw its forces within 30 days and lift all sanctions on Iran.
• It would pave the way for a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran.
• The US would allow Iran to resume oil sales through temporary sanctions waivers.
• Iran, Oman and Gulf states would negotiate new shipping and maritime security arrangements for the Gulf.

The last stipulation, according to the paper, means that Iran and Oman would charge for transit through the Strait of Hormuz—something that did not exist before the war and gives Iran a source of revenue it did not have.

To me, this is a U.S. loss: our efforts gained us nothing: not the cessation of terrorism, not the drive of Iran to produce a nuclear weapon (we all know they’ll continue trying), nt the freedom of the Iranian people or even a weakening of the hard-line Islamist regime, and we may have even lost the right of free (unpaid) passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Plus we’ll release the Iranian funds frozen by the U.S.

I’ve already noted that this is a terrible deal for the U.S., and, in his latest column, “Iran found Trump’s bone spur” (archived here).  I quote from Stephens’s piece, and I’ve put a bit in bold, a bit that makes me both sad and angry:

Iran’s military leaders have greeted the cease-fire agreement with President Trump as a triumph, crowing that “through the imposition of their divine and iron will” they had “humiliated American and Zionist enemies.”

Mostly, they’re right.

Mostly, because it’s worth remembering that the current regime in Iran is far less formidable than it was before the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Back then, Iran had potent allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. Its nuclear program was intact and steadily accumulating ever larger quantities of highly enriched uranium. It had a powerful military-industrial base, a weak but functional economy and a government that — for all its repressiveness — was internationally recognized as legitimate.

Today, much of that is either gone or diminished. Iran is no longer within sprinting distance of a bomb. Its ally in Syria was deposed. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis have lost much of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is the world’s most worthless currency. The leadership rules an unhappy population that — outside of die-hard loyalists — would almost certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Its latest ballistic missile salvo against Israel failed to land a serious single blow. Its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz strained, but did not strangle, the world’s energy markets.

Those are real achievements against an evil, ambitious regime. Yet the outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength. War is a contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington.

I write this as someone who supported the war from the outset and hoped to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not regime change, then at least a deal in which Iran would be forced to relinquish all of its enrichment capabilities and access to the Strait was unfettered. Those goals were well within the president’s reach, particularly if he had continued to attack Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure until it agreed to terms, rather than conducting most of the negotiations after the fighting had mostly stopped.

But Trump got spooked after the regime didn’t instantly crumble and energy prices shot up. He then effectively abandoned the war he had started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — combat in which the United States lost fewer service members than in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He compounded the error with an almost comical succession of military threats and last-minute climb-downs, each of them signaling indecision and weakness to Iranian adversaries practiced in the study of weakness.

Though the details of the deal remain murky — a telling indicator of its likely shoddiness, since the administration would surely trumpet the terms of a strong agreement — it’s already clear that Trump has betrayed his promise to the Iranian people, after they were massacred in January to quell antigovernment protests, that “help is on its way.” As in Venezuela, to say nothing of China and Russia, this administration’s message to oppressed people everywhere is that their rights come last.

Trump is also on his way to betraying Israel, our principal ally in this fight, by pushing Jerusalem to stand down in its effort to stop Hezbollah’s attacks on its north, in that way handing Tehran the victory of creating a diplomatic linkage between Lebanon and Hormuz. If Iran is now allowed to extract some kind of service fee for permitting ships to transit the Strait, Trump will have also betrayed our allies in the Persian Gulf by giving Iran financial and strategic leverage to which it has no right, and which it didn’t previously have.

. . . There’s a word for this: debacle. Not because the war, for all its costs or errors of execution, was a mistake. It’s because this pretense of a peace is an act of geopolitical self-harm that will haunt our standing in the world for years to come.

It’s very sad.  Please weigh in below, giving your thoughts and opinion whether this is a good deal for the U.S., a bad deal, or whether you have no opinion about it.

I don’t know how Trump can claim victory when he’s merely restored a somewhat less favorable status quo, but you can be sure he’ll be crowing himself.