By Kevin Nealer

June 18, 2026

The 14-point memorandum of understanding that serves as a preliminary inventory of the outcomes of Donald Trump’s war against Iran is, among other things, a testament to the diminishment of American power in the form of an ironic postscript to the Obama administration’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal.

(That irony was underscored Wednesday when Trump signed the MOU at Versailles, where Germany conceded to the reparations and territorial losses of defeat on June 28th 1919).

The JCPOA was a multilateral agreement between the P5+1 (United States, UK, France, Germany, China, and Russia) and Iran negotiated to limit the Iranian nuclear program and place more than 200 inspectors and an array of 24/7 electronic monitors on-site in the country in return for sanctions relief and other provisions.

Donald Trump withdrew the United States from that agreement on May 18th, 2018, and the deal was repealed on October 28th, 2025, per its 10-year expiration date.

After 111 days of a war whose casus belli was never clearly articulated, the provisions of the agreement to end it take on greater importance as a summary of agreed-upon alterations to the pre-war status quo.

But while the focus on the actual text of Trump’s US/Iran MOU and what it means for the Strait of Hormuz, global trade, and the energy markets is understandable, it asks too much of a document that is far from comprehensive.

The MOU has been correctly described as more the table of contents to a book than the book itself. For comparison, it took roughly a year to translate the preliminary agreement of the JCPOA into a structured deal with “action for action” metrics that dealt with most implementation issues.

There is very little prospect that the full version of the agreement will be achieved in Trump’s notional 60-day timeline.

Expect the MOU term sheet to be savaged by conservative Republicans as well as Democrats. It previews where talks are headed, not what a final accord will be.

It could have been the case that the US team would argue for keeping even the agreed language of the MOU out of the public domain as has been the case with most of Trump’s trade agreements.

In this case, Tehran has a different incentive structure — with less face to lose having kept most of its putative red lines intact. The text is now public, but with many key terms (e.g., modalities for Strait reopening, the staging of asset unfreezing and sanctions relief, the use of possible tolls) left vague or undefined.

The MOU will do nothing to clarify the timeline for Gulf oil and gas production asset rehabilitation — a process that (for gas and related downstream products) will take 2-3 years, according to experts directly involved.

That process will involve regional competition for scarce expertise and bespoke parts/equipment, and it will test the willingness of Gulf states to cooperate among themselves — never their first instinct.

The MOU does offer important clues on sequencing and expectations. Trump agreed to these initial terms based on a political judgment, having declined to further escalate. Israel, which is not a party to the MOU, will have no such reluctance.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is perhaps temporarily chastened by pressure from Trump but maintains that Israel is not bound by the agreement and shows no signs of relenting on operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

That activism is locked in by Israeli public opinion and Netanyahu’s own pre-election incentives. The risk that Tehran will use Israel’s prosecution of the war to scuttle the agreement remains high.

Expect the MOU term sheet to be savaged by conservative Republicans as well as Democrats. It previews where talks are headed, not what a final accord will be. That likely will take close to a year, assuming no interim failure points, of which there could be many.

Not unexpectedly, given the trajectory of this conflict as well as Trump’s relationship with democracy, after all the talk of support for Iranian protesters, the deal says nothing about transitions within the Iranian polity, instead promising a hands-off approach to Tehran’s internal affairs.

As an outcome representing the entrenchment of autocracy for a whole new generation in yet another country, it is a public affirmation that American goals and purported values are now evanescent, and to be marked to market against oil prices.

Policy Contributing Writer Kevin Nealer is a principal of The Scowcroft Group, a Washington, D.C.-based international business advisory firm founded by the late Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford. Its principals generously provide Policy’s regular Letter from Washington and Scowcroft Group Snapshot posts.