The Iran deal Trump signed may be the prelude to the next war
The memorandum of understanding that President Trump signed with Iran last week ended 115 days of open war. But as Foreign Policy’s Daniel Byman argues in a new analysis, the agreement may be better understood as an intermission.
Byman, a Georgetown professor and director of the Warfare and Irregular Threats Program at CSIS, draws a sharp comparison between the Iran deal and Trump’s earlier Gaza agreement. “As his Gaza agreement has shown,” he writes, “Trump is better at fanfare than follow-up.” The pattern is the same: a dramatic signing, a photo opportunity, and then a slow unraveling as the details that were glossed over in the rush to announce re-emerge as deal-breakers.
The Gaza comparison is instructive. Trump’s Gaza framework was announced with similar ceremony. It collapsed within weeks as Israel continued military operations and Hamas refused to surrender its remaining hostages under the terms the U.S. assumed would be accepted. The same dynamics are visible in the Iran deal.
What the MoU does and does not do
The 14-point memorandum signed electronically on June 17 commits both sides to a 60-day negotiating window. Iran agrees to dilute its enriched uranium stockpile under IAEA supervision. The U.S. agrees to lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports and begin the process of sanctions relief. A high-level committee will oversee working groups on nuclear issues, sanctions, and dispute resolution.
What the MoU does not address is a longer list. It does not cover Iran’s ballistic missile program, which Gulf states consider the primary threat to their security. It does not specify the mechanism or timeline for releasing Iran’s frozen assets, estimated at tens of billions of dollars. It does not resolve the status of the Strait of Hormuz tolls, a point of sharp disagreement between Trump’s public statements and the deal’s actual language. And it does not bind Israel, which has already signaled that it will continue operations against Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Syria regardless of what the U.S. and Iran agree.
Byman’s core argument is structural: the deal gives Iran most of what it wants up front: sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, an end to the blockade, while postponing the hardest questions to the 60-day window. That gives Tehran every incentive to slow-walk the nuclear talks once it has secured economic relief, while the U.S. has limited leverage to compel cooperation.
“This is a situation where one side gives on what the other side wants the most,” said Thomas Warrick of the Atlantic Council, “and then gives up in return what the other side wants.” The question is which side runs out of patience first.
The Trump factor
Byman also examines Trump’s personal role in the deal’s fragility. The president has a documented habit of declaring victory and moving on. During the Iran war, he made at least three separate claims that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen “within days.” Each time, it did not. His statements on the deal have been similarly elastic. One day he says Iran has agreed to full inspections, the next he threatens to bomb again if Iran does not comply.
That pattern of contradictory signaling is built into the agreement’s architecture. The MoU allows both sides to claim victory to their domestic audiences. Trump can tell Americans he ended the war and reopened Hormuz. Iran’s leadership can tell its people it resisted American pressure and secured sanctions relief. But a deal that is designed for domestic consumption is not necessarily designed to hold.
What comes next
The coming weeks will test whether the agreement’s structure is strong enough to survive its own contradictions. Technical talks continue this week at Burgenstock. IAEA inspectors are expected to return to Iran’s nuclear sites. Rubio will brief Gulf allies on the deal’s terms.
But the unresolved issues are not technical. They are political. Can the U.S. and Iran agree on what “sanctions relief” means when the U.S. Treasury has layered thousands of designations over four decades? Can Iran accept IAEA access to military sites where the U.S. and Israel conducted airstrikes last year? Can Israel be persuaded to halt operations in Lebanon when its government considers Hezbollah an existential threat?
Byman’s conclusion is not alarmist but it is sober. The deal that ended the war, he suggests, may have simply moved the conflict from the battlefield to the negotiating table, and then left the negotiators with a set of questions that are harder to solve than the war itself.