It’s impossible to judge the Trump administration’s “deal” adequately with the surviving leaders of Iran’s regime without more information. The memorandum of understanding, announced with great fanfare on Sunday, is really more of a placeholder, with crucial details to be filled in over a 60-day window.
Perhaps it is best understood as the latest ceasefire pact, one that entails a near-immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a prompt lifting of the U.S. naval blockade strangling the Iranian economy. Neither development is a grand achievement, as both merely restore the pre-conflict status quo.
Team Trump insists that any direct sanctions relief will be “performance-based,” meaning it will be conditioned on the regime’s fulfillment of mandatory benchmarks. But the precise nature of those benchmarks is, again, still to be determined.
It is unclear what the freshly signed document does and does not say, even apart from the specifics that we know have not yet been determined. President Donald Trump said the text of the memo would likely be released after Friday’s signing ceremony in Switzerland. An unnamed administration official told journalists the text could be made public sooner, perhaps by midweek.
For now, observers are left to make sense of claims from the White House, propaganda from the regime, and leaked information. This guessing game does not serve the interests of a fair-minded or transparency-driven debate on the merits. The administration should publish the document immediately.
The most important element of any ultimate agreement, if one is reached, is a permanent and verifiable resolution of the nuclear question. Any deal that does not require the removal or destruction of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, which Trump calls the “nuclear dust,” along with the confirmed dismantlement of the country’s nuclear program, would look like a capitulation.
This was, after all, the war’s top objective. Iran simply agreeing to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons is woefully insufficient. The regime has falsely denied those ambitions for many years. It cannot be trusted.
As senior American officials wax poetic about the possibility of a fresh start between the two nations, the priority should be confirmation of total and coerced compliance, not some optimistic-to-naive hope for a miraculous change of heart.
Beyond the bare minimum on nuclear weapons, what concrete steps, if any, are in the offing to curtail Iran’s malign influence through terrorist proxies? That is a major consideration that has been vaguely touted as part of the deal. Did it make it into the text?
And is restricting the regime’s rogue missile program in the mix at all? We do not yet have clear answers, though the answer to that question is looking like “no.”
What any of this means for the beleaguered and abused people of Iran is also hazy, especially if the widely loathed regime is set to receive a large windfall of power-sustaining cash. Even if America successfully defuses the nuclear threat, which is critically important, the fate of the subjugated Iranian people is not some insignificant moral afterthought.
One trendy talking point on the Left is that Trump’s eventual policy is likely to resemble the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, from which Trump rightly withdrew in his first term. Former President Barack Obama himself has amplified this suggestion.
The current president’s overarching goal should be to ensure that such comparisons fall flat by securing an empirically stronger agreement with teeth. Obama’s giveaway effectively blessed Iran’s nuclear program, with its key weapons-related limitations expiring over time. It was a wildly expensive kick of the nuclear can.
If Trump delivers dismantlement, that alone would be a massive upgrade. Trump also forced Iran to the table through the blistering use of force, together with the Israelis and some other Gulf allies. He opened the negotiation by blowing up major nuclear sites, hugely degrading Iran’s military capacity, taking out a large percentage of its missile program and its ability to produce missiles, and decapitating much of the regime’s upper echelon, including the ayatollah.
Failing to account for those major achievements will result in poor and tendentious analyses of whatever final agreement may emerge. The Trump deal may implode on the launch pad. It might be exposed as a politically expedient cave job. It might be deeply flawed, but still worthwhile in important respects. Or it could punctuate a dramatic military and diplomatic triumph.
We simply do not know enough yet to reach any definitive conclusion. Let’s see the document. Then let’s see what the next two months bring. Time and outcomes will tell the real story soon enough.