How many times did I say, over the past, let’s call it five weeks, that the IRGC should wake up and smell the “covfefe,” where that meant recognize that all Donald Trump requires to settle any given dispute is an MOU?
Quite a few. I said that quite a few times. Verbatim, even, on the MOU point.
Substantially all of Trump’s 2025 trade “deals” were unenforceable, non-binding, one-pagers which even the administration often referred to as memoranda rather than covenants.
The great irony of Donald Trump, self-styled master of deals, is that he possesses neither the discipline nor the patience (complimentary attributes) necessary to engage in serious dealmaking.
I dare say Trump’s never personally closed a real deal in his life, at least not if that means directly participating, from beginning to end, in the often arduous, always painstaking, process of hammering out the specifics of a formal, legally-binding contract.
By now, even the most neophytic geopolitical observer can recognize Trump’s waning interest in the Iran conflict. It’s not that he wants to “wash his hands” of the whole thing — he’s quite proud of this adventure. Rather, his short attention span wants to leave well enough alone and move on, the same way he did after absconding with Nicolas Maduro and declaring a de facto US colony under Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela.
For the IRGC, that’s an opportunity: All they have to do is reiterate Iran’s long-standing contention that the country’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes (that’ll be the same lie it’s always been, but no one besides Benjamin Netanyahu cares anymore), pay lip service to a handful of vacuous “terms” couched in language so nonspecific as to render them meaningless and agree to open the Strait.
That’s all it would take to send Trump’s “armada” on its merry way and get the ball rolling on sanctions relief. In short order, Iran would be flooded with oil dollars, which the Guards would be free to skim as they see fit with no interference from any clerics.
Well, guess what? According to Axios, the generals might’ve finally come around to that reality.
“The White House believes it’s getting close to an agreement with Iran to end the war and set a framework for more detailed nuclear negotiations,” a pair of US officials told Barak Ravid. Two additional sources privy to the talks verified that account.
The agreement would be — you guessed it — “a one-page memorandum of understanding” with 14 bullet points including a commitment from Iran to stop enriching uranium, US sanctions relief, phased release of “billions” in frozen Iranian funds and a mutual deescalation in the Strait, which would be reopened to commercial maritime traffic.
Although the length of the enrichment moratorium was still a point of contention, officials said it could be set at 12 years initially. Iran would also forswear a nuclear bomb and, perhaps, promise not to rebuild subterranean nuclear installations.
This could all come to naught if the IRGC insists on recalcitrance, and even if the MOU does in fact materialize, it wouldn’t be in any sense definitive. And indeed, that’s been my point all along: If you’re the Guards, what’s the downside? If you’re not being asked to commit earnestly to anything, and if there’s no compliance regime, then “resistance” is just grandstanding.
The Guards’ posturing would be understandable if there was a credible threat of domestic upheaval (you don’t want to show weakness if there’s an organized internal resistance movement), or if peacocking wasn’t costing them hundreds of millions in lost oil revenue per day, but there isn’t and it is.
In the Axios piece, Ravid went on to say that “many of the terms would be contingent on a final agreement being reached, leaving the possibility of renewed war or an extended limbo in which the hot war has stopped but nothing is truly resolved.” So, a lot like Trump’s trade war(s).
If your question is, “How is this a better outcome for America than the JCPOA which, while flawed, was everything a Trump one-pager isn’t in terms of rigor, enforceability and seriousness of intent?”, I’m afraid the answer’s precisely what you suspect.
To be clear, is what’s meant here to return the strait to its prewar condition and sign a vacuous nuclear-MOU? Or ‘open the strait’ as they’ve done before, along with the MOU?
If the former, I’ll be pleasantly shocked if Iran agrees to it. If the latter, I’ll be very surprised if the US agrees to it.
Next up, Cuba!
The winner of this year’s FIFA WAR prize is…..
There are two kinds of plans. First, a deal that is signed, witnessed and has consequences if the contract is not fulfilled.
Second, what my friends and I used to call ‘bar talk”. Like when you have drunk whiskey all night, and agree to go the next morning, and meet up later, and all drive to Las Vegas.
MOUs are bar talk.
Lee – at least you would have been allowed into Las Vegas. Very welcome if you were still toasted and had pockets full of cash to spend!
Compare to a few of my fraternity brothers back in the 1970s who, after a night of drinking, decided to drive up to Canada for breakfast. Which would be a five-hour drive. They departed around 4 am and miraculously completed the visit, despite the driver having to hang a match box over one lens of his specs to counteract double vision.
In an incident which presaged our current relationship with Canada, the country’s border official’s DID NOT welcome or admit the five drunk college boys. They all hold grudges against the nation to this day. Rightly so.
Meanwhile, SPX 7350. With apologies for not being the liberal hero a lot of you folks apparently still thought I was as recently as a few months ago, I’ll take that — the market gains, I mean — however it comes. [Insert shrug emoji]
You are all of our liberal non-hero shrugs at the moment. You can know what is best for people, but if they choose the latter, well we’re all pragmatists at some point.
Money still has to be made.
Trump seems really desperate to get out of the Iran mess he got himself into. He’s been making more and more concessions to the regime, starting with a unilateral ceasefire for a short time, then extending it when Iran no-showed in Islanabad, now offering to extend it indefinitely if Iran will just agree to what Rubio described as a “framework for negotiations” i.e. a list of things we’ll talk about and a promise to talk.
At some point, the “deal” on offer gets too good for the regime to pass up. How good that has to be, I’m not sure, but I’m increasingly thinking there is no deal too good (for Iran) for Trump to accept, as long as it is dressed up in face-saving (for Trump) words – and words are cheap.
Could we see something like Iran agrees to normalize navigation subject to ships accepting IRGC assistance in following the “Persian Strait Authority’s” orderly procedures to safely transit the now-mined (hey, that’s what the US Navy says) SoH through the remaining safe channel in Iranian waters, while the US releases frozen funds and lifts sanctions, with both parties agreeing to earnestly negotiate nuclear issues someday? If so, why wouldn’t the regime accept that?
We really can’t lose track of the fact — and take it from someone who for a decade harbored an unhealthy intellectual obsession with Qassem Soleimani, it is a fact — that this regime isn’t even a shadow of a shadow of its former self. I can’t emphasize this enough: It’s almost all gone. The people, the network, the conventional military capacity, all of it. The US and Israel have turned the nation-state leader of a transnational Shia coalition which succeeded in all but encircling the Sunni monarchies into a military junta whose best course of action going forward is to be content with a monopoly on a giant, oil-funded klepto-mafia state. The latter’s not nothin,’ and I’ve been adamant that under the circumstances, it is indeed a great outcome for the Guards. But my goodness: This ain’t what Qassem had in mind, nor Hassan Nasrallah, I can assure you of that.
It seems to me that Iran’s conventional military power was not really very useful. The US and Israel have shown that. I guess Iran could rattle conventional sabers at neighbors, but only those not megadonors to the US or not themselves well-armed.
To the extent that they want to, Iran can rebuild their forces, right? Freely exporting oil, reunited with their frozen funds, earning some “maritime service revenue” from the SoH, in five years can’t Iran have its missile stocks back to 100% and a respectable number of (Chinese) fighters and helicopters, even a few frigates?
Losing Hamas and maybe Hezbollah seems like the biggest blow. Perhaps that focuses the regime’s attention on nuclear ambitions?
“But Trump’s history of nursing grudges, ridiculing opponents and insisting he wins everything doesn’t bode well for those hoping diplomacy can bring the war to a close, according to interviews with 10 current and former U.S. and Arab officials.
“He badly wants this to end,” a senior Gulf Arab official familiar with the peace talks said of Trump. “But the Iranians are so far refusing to give him what he needs to save face and leave. And he does not seem to understand that they need to save face, too.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/06/iran-deal-obstacle-trump-ego-00909102
What do you think of this argument though? That the primary problem is like with tariffs, Trump can’t keep his mouth shut
Under the new proposal, we would really be no better off than we were under the JCPOA in 2019, when Trump chose to withdraw from that agreement. What was the point then??? The only potential positive is if voters hold Trump and the GOP responsible for this costly misadventure in the upcoming midterm elections.
$25 Billion and what do you get?
3 months older and deeper in debt.
Actually, seems worse off than under the JCPOA unless the new terms still include meaningful IAEA inspections (maybe they are quibbling about inspections for the final MOU?).
The other differences: Iran lost most of the IRGC infrastructure and its religious leadership but will gain sanctions relief.
And with Israel uncaged and nobody’s word worth banking on, wouldn’t the IRGC cling to nuclear deterrence one way or another? I wonder if China may be especially helpful to them here?
Trump and his war sycophants are stupid and lazy. They will never do the work required for anything like JCPOA. They don’t read, study and gain understanding. They are pumped full of slogans, childish names and hot air. There would be a better chance of a reasonable outcome with 5 million monkeys wacking away on keyboards. Want to send shivers down your spine, imagine being dependent on Trump for anything other than a good laugh. His day consists of truthing, sleeping and calling anyone who displeases him ‘low IQ’. It speaks volumes about US democratic structure that he’s still in office. Everything going forward now depends on ‘the market’. It’s his last handhold.