A fragile peace between Washington and Tehran took a real step forward this week, with both sides signing a memorandum that reopens the Strait of Hormuz and buys two months of breathing room to thrash out a fuller peace deal. Donald Trump hailed the agreement as a diplomatic breakthrough during a press conference at the G7 summit in France, and officials in both capitals confirmed the memo had been signed electronically on Wednesday and was already in force.
Briefings given to journalists afterwards filled in some of the gaps, though they also showed how many of the most contentious issues, on Iran’s nuclear programme, its regional influence and the reconstruction plan, have simply been pushed into the next round of talks.
Nuclear weapons sit at the centre of it all. Trump has repeatedly promised that Iran will never buy, build or develop a bomb under this arrangement. The agreement’s own wording doesn’t quite go that far.
What it does is kick off a frantic eight-week race to turn a temporary truce into something lasting. For context, the original 2015 nuclear accord took the Obama administration roughly 20 months to negotiate. Trump’s team now has a fraction of that time, though the deadline can be pushed back if talks run long.
So far, Iran has agreed to “downblend” its stockpile of highly enriched uranium under watch from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a move officials described as a “significant concession” from Tehran. The finer print, how this will actually happen and on what schedule, is left for negotiators to sort out during the 60-day window.
On money, Trump has been adamant – not a dollar of US cash will go to Iran. He’s long pointed to the Obama administration’s $1.7 billion payment to Tehran in 2016 as a sore point, and has clearly wanted this deal to look tougher by comparison.
According to a BBC report, Yet the text tells a slightly different story. It commits Washington to working with regional partners on a reconstruction plan worth at least $300 billion for Iran. A senior official insisted this doesn’t amount to America footing the bill directly, but the wording leaves real questions open about how the programme gets funded and whether US money could flow in eventually as part of a wider settlement.
That ambiguity has already caused friction at home, including among Trump’s own party. Several lawmakers are pushing for briefings and questioning whether Washington secured enough in return, with some particularly uneasy about deeper US entanglement abroad.
Outgoing Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, who recently lost a primary contest to a Trump-endorsed rival, was among the sharpest critics. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future,” he wrote on X, calling it “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
Two other issues that loomed large when the conflict began get barely a mention in the page-and-a-half text. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had both named Iran’s missile programme as a priority, yet the agreement offers little detail on it. The same goes for Tehran’s support for regional proxies: the ceasefire does extend to Hezbollah, but the group features only in passing, leaving it unclear whether Iran will face pressure to cut those ties in the talks ahead.
Whether this week’s signing in Geneva leads to a lasting peace is still an open question. The fact that the 60-day window can be extended hints that neither side is fully confident a complete deal is within reach.
Even Trump sounded fairly matter-of-fact about it at his G7 appearance, “If it doesn’t get done in 60 days, it’s all right. We go back to bombing.”
For now, though, the guns have fallen quiet, and one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes is open again. The harder negotiations still lie ahead.
