I was told there would be a “final determination.”

Late last week, Donald Trump said he was heading into a meeting in the Situation Room, where he’d decide whether to Sharpie (that’s an action verb) an MOU reopening the Strait of Hormuz and setting the stage for two months of negotiations around the fate of the Iranian nuclear program.

The terms of the arrangement were agreed earlier in the week. Although it wasn’t clear whether Mojtaba Khamenei in fact signed off, it’s reasonable to assume he was willing. Otherwise, the IRGC would’ve flatly denied the existence of the document rather than allowing news of the provisional agreement to freely circulate.

(As a quick aside, a small minority of Iranians, both civilian and government officials, are opposed to any negotiations. But they have very little political sway and aren’t well represented in the IRGC, where preserving the corruption racket means avoiding a full-scale US invasion.)

Most market participants expected an announcement from Trump by Monday (if not by Friday afternoon) on the status of the MOU, but according to reports, he sent a modified version of the agreement with “tougher” terms back to Tehran, leaving the state of peace talks in limbo. “Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the USA,” he reiterated on Monday morning.

In the meantime, the US military struck more coastal IRGC positions in retaliation for the downing of an American drone last week. The Guards responded with attacks on US installations in Kuwait, a repeat of the tit-for-tat that rankled Kuwaiti and Emirati officials on May 28. Kuwait again chided Iran for perpetrating “a direct assault” on the country.

In Lebanon, it’s the usual melee. The IDF’s fully engaged south of Beirut, which presumably means in and around Dahiya, Hezbollah’s suburban stronghold where Hassan Nasrallah and his cousin and heir Hashem Safieddine were assassinated in 2024.

Photos and video from the outskirts of the capital showed bumper-to-bumper traffic as residents moved their families out of harm’s way. The evacuations are “a miserable routine for many Lebanese,” as The New York Times aptly put it, quoting one local who said, “I lost count of how many times I’ve evacuated.”

Later, Tasnim said Iran may stop exchanging diplomatic messages with the US if the Israeli bombardment in Lebanon continues.

Trump berated both sides of the American political spectrum on Monday. “Don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping?'” he wondered.

Trump went on to complain that he’s being pushed and pulled in all directions. “I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever,” he groused. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end — It always does!”