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.
