Nathan Howard, Pool Photo via AP Delegation staff members meet in the lobby on the first day of a quadrilateral meeting between the U.S., Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar near Stansstad, Switzerland on June 21. When President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding, the terms looked, on paper, like a significant concession from Washington.
Iran’s missile program was to be off the table. Its regional allies were off the table. The U.S. committed to a $300 billion reconstruction framework, the release of $24 billion in frozen assets, and the reopening of the Persian Gulf under what the agreement describes as Iran’s own management arrangements. Mediation would come not from Europe or the UN, but from Pakistan and Qatar.
Most international coverage treated the signing as a turning point. It was — but perhaps not in the way the headlines suggested. The more consequential question was whether this agreement could actually be implemented. We may already have our answer. As it turned out, the deal was less a diplomatic breakthrough and more a mechanism for ending a war that neither side could afford to continue. And even for that purpose, it wasn’t suited to the task.
Start with Iran. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a public statement that he held a different view on how the negotiations should proceed, and that responsibility for outcomes rests with Pezeshkian, who gave personal guarantees that Washington would honor its commitments. That was not the language of a leadership unified behind a historic deal.
The internal picture was more complicated still. The deputy chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Commission said publicly that Iranian negotiators discussed nuclear issues in Islamabad without the Khamenei’s authorization. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s response in a subsequent television interview stopped short of a denial.
These were not minor procedural disputes. They indicated a negotiating team that had moved faster and further than the domestic political consensus will sustain.
On the other side, continued war meant further damage to Iran’s infrastructure, which was already under strain. It meant deeper economic deterioration, and the risk of drawing in partners like Russia and China, upon whose support Tehran depends on but whose tolerance for regional instability has limits.
Beijing and Moscow have economic exposure to Persian Gulf stability, making a prolonged conflict increasingly uncomfortable for both. Iran wanted an exit as much as Washington did, even if the terms it could accept were narrower.
Public opinion reinforces this picture. Iranians have been in the streets for more than 130 nights. The mood in working-class neighborhoods like Narmak in east Tehran, where people gathered under outdoor screens to watch the World Cup while debating the peace deal between goals, was not triumphant but watchful and conditional. The question people were asking is not whether the terms were good on paper, but whether Washington could be trusted to deliver.
Given that the U.S. walked out of the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 despite eighteen consecutive IAEA compliance reports, that skepticism is grounded in experience rather than ideology.
On the American side, the resistance was equally structural. Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) have been openly critical. Tillis put the cost plainly: roughly $100 billion spent, 13 American soldiers killed, 365 wounded, and a deal that Cassidy compared to the Obama deal, only worse.
Vance and Trump publicly insisted that no money would be paid to Iran. And article one of the memorandum of understanding — which required a comprehensive ceasefire across all fronts, including Lebanon — was not enforced. Israeli forces are still in southern Lebanon to this day. The first commitment Washington was supposed to deliver was not delivered. The Iranian negotiating team briefly suspended its travel to Geneva over precisely this point.
Iran and Oman established a joint maritime authority, from which every vessel transiting the strait was to require a permit from that body. Mohsen Rezaei, a top adviser to Khamenei, told Chinese state television that the strait will not return to its pre-war status, and that Iran’s friends — particularly China and Russia — had nothing to worry about because they will be treated accordingly.
France, in a telling episode, obtained a permit from Iranian authorities to transit a chemical shipment through the strait despite Trump’s insistence that no country should seek Iranian authorization. When a NATO ally quietly complies with an arrangement Washington publicly opposes, the operational reality has already moved past the diplomatic one.
The memorandum of understanding mattered less as a peace treaty than as a signal about the limits of American coercive power — a signal that must now be reinterpreted. The U.S. launched a full military campaign against Iran and could not, at least initially, break its strategic posture. It then signed an agreement that it may not be able to implement, and whose core provisions depended on leverage over an Israeli government that was not listening.
China’s leaders noted all of this. Xi Jinping’s recent reference to the “Thucydides trap” in conversations with Trump was not incidental. If Washington cannot defeat Iran militarily and cannot follow through on its own diplomatic commitments, the credibility of American deterrence in Asia faces questions that no memorandum can answer.
The Iranian side faced a public and a Supreme Leader that had already signaled that uranium transfers and unconditional Persian Gulf access are politically impossible. The American side faced a skeptical Senate that may not ratify any final agreement, and an administration that kept contradicting its own negotiators.
Is it any surprise, then, that the memorandum failed to end the war?
On July 8, Trump declared the memorandum “dead.” The two sides, it turns out, were never on track to reach a final agreement. Tehran has taken no such position publicly, but that contrast matters less than it appears. Whether the memorandum is formally alive or dead changes little on the ground. The conduct of both sides since its first days made clear they were never moving toward a final agreement.
Trump’s statement did not kill the deal; it merely confirmed, out loud, what both sides’ own actions had already signaled.
Peiman Salehi is a political analyst covering Iran and global geopolitics.
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