Let us take Donald Trump at his word, just for a moment.
For eight years, Trump told anyone who would listen that the JCPOA, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal brokered by Barack Obama, was "one of the worst and dumbest" agreements in American history. He called it "tantamount to giving them a nuclear weapon." He said it was "a giant fiction." In 2018, he tore it up, reimposed crushing sanctions, and promised that when he, Donald Trump, dealt with Iran, the world would get something categorically, undeniably, irreversibly better.
Now look at what he's signed.
The MOU commits the United States to ending "all types of sanctions" on Iran, including those approved by the United Nations and the IAEA, as well as unilateral sanctions. In exchange, Iran reiterates that it would not produce nuclear weapons, a commitment Iran made under the Obama deal and was reportedly willing to make again in negotiations before Trump and Netanyahu launched the war on February 28. In other words: the same verbal promise, wrapped in the same paper, dressed up as a victory.
But it gets worse. Much worse.
The sixth clause of the agreement commits the United States and regional partners to develop a plan with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States. There is no detail of who pays. There is no detail of restrictions on how it could be spent. Trump has gestured vaguely at Gulf partners picking up the tab, but the Gulf countries have made no such commitment. This is a $300 billion blank check written in invisible ink.
Meanwhile, Iran's uranium stockpile now includes uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, just a short step to weapons-grade material, and the MOU's disposition of that stockpile? The mechanics of handling Iran's uranium will be decided in technical negotiations over the next 60 days. In other words: we haven't actually dealt with it. We've agreed to agree about it later. Trump called this approach "99.9 percent" of what he wanted. The remaining 0.1 percent, it turns out, is the actual bomb.
Compare this to what Obama negotiated. Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to cap enrichment at 3.67 percent purity for 15 years, well below the 90 percent level required to produce a nuclear weapon. Iran also agreed to cap its enriched uranium stockpile at 300 kilograms, a reduction of 98 percent, according to the United States. The JCPOA was a 159-page agreement hammered out over 18 months with China, Russia, France, the UK, and Germany all at the table. The memorandum is a shaky bilateral agreement between parties who have little trust in each other, as Chatham House's Shahram Akbarzadeh bluntly put it.
The Obama deal, for all its genuine flaws, at least had the bones of a verification regime. This MOU has a 60-day clock and a prayer.
Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies military strategy and international security, said that if Trump believed the JCPOA was a roadmap to an Iranian nuclear weapon, the MOU "is a super highway."
Read that again. A super highway.
And yet here is Trump at the G7 in Versailles, the very palace where the punitive post-World War I settlement was signed, a settlement historians have long blamed for the conditions that produced World War II, signing a document he calls a triumph. The symbolism is almost too cruel to invent.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian described the memorandum of understanding as an opportunity to tackle Iran's economic and political problems. When the regime you bombed is describing your deal as an economic opportunity, you have not won. You have been managed.
Trump said on Wednesday he hoped the deal would deliver peace across the region and lower oil prices, and also threatened to resume attacks on Iran if it failed to honor its commitments: "If you don't adhere to the agreement, I don't want to do that, but we're going to bomb the hell out of you." This is the leverage on which Western security now rests: a threat to bomb people he already bombed, which produced the deal he is now celebrating. The circularity is dizzying.
Let us also be precise about what was bought with American blood, treasure, and months of Strait of Hormuz economic chaos. The U.S. got Iran to agree to open the Strait of Hormuz. But that is simply a return to the pre-war status quo. It is not a gain. It is the undoing of damage that the war itself created. And even that is provisional: Point 5 of the 14-point MOU states the strait will be toll-free for only 60 days, but after that Iran will work with neighboring Oman to "define future administration and maritime services," meaning tolls are not ruled out. Iran may yet tax the world's oil supply at the Strait it tried to choke. America paid for the privilege of returning to a status quo that may not hold.
What did Israel get? Netanyahu was caught by surprise when Trump announced the deal on Sunday, and Israeli officials claimed as recently as Tuesday that Israel still hadn't been allowed to review the MOU. The country that fought alongside the United States, that endured weeks of Iranian ballistic missile and drone strikes, was not shown the text of the agreement ending the war it co-fought. The MOU says the ceasefire includes the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, and that Israel would have to withdraw from Lebanon under any final deal. No Hezbollah disarmament required. No ironclad guarantee that the precision-guided missile factories being rebuilt across southern Lebanon will be dismantled. Just a withdrawal, and an expectation that diplomacy will handle the rest.
Trump also criticized Israel's tactics in Lebanon at the G7, saying it was unacceptable "to knock down an apartment house every time you're looking for somebody." The president who launched the war is now lecturing the ally who helped him fight it on the ethics of counterterrorism. The audacity is breathtaking.
As someone who had a front-row seat to previous negotiations with Iran, having served as President Barack Obama's ambassador to Israel, I can unequivocally say that, from the U.S. perspective, this is a very weak deal, wrote former Ambassador Dan Shapiro. Note well who is writing those words: a senior Obama-era official, who defended the original JCPOA, is saying Trump's deal is worse.
The supporters of this deal will point to the ceasefire. They will note that oil prices have fallen, that the Strait is reopened, that active military hostilities have paused. These things are real, and they matter. A ceasefire is always preferable to active war. No serious person should want the bombing to continue.
But a ceasefire and a strategic victory are not the same thing. Ending a war you started by giving the enemy what they wanted is not a triumph. It is management of failure.
Sanctions relief, variously described as released frozen assets, oil sanctions waivers, and reconstruction investments, will strengthen the regime, producing revenue that will be poured into its missile program and proxy networks. Iran's proxies, from Hezbollah to the Houthis to what remains of Hamas, will be reconstituted, rearmed, and redirected. The Islamic Republic itself, badly damaged but not dismantled, will rebuild. It will do so with the very economic lifeline that the United States has now provided.
Iran knows that this has been a deeply unpopular war that Americans felt in their own pocketbooks. The Iranian leadership is not likely to take seriously that Trump would return to fighting, certainly before the midterms. Tehran has outwaited American presidents before. It will do so again.
There is a version of history in which Donald Trump, having launched a war, having bombed Iran's nuclear facilities in July 2025, having squeezed the regime harder than any American president in decades, then negotiated from that position of demonstrated strength into a final deal with real dismantlement, real inspections, real long-term enrichment bans, and real consequences for noncompliance. That deal would have been something. That deal would have justified the costs.
This is not that deal. This is a 14-point framework written on the back of a G7 photo op. This is Iran's nuclear file left open for 60 days of negotiations with a regime that has been outmaneuvering Western diplomats for 40 years. This is $300 billion pledged to a terror-sponsoring state with no accounting and no restrictions. This is the same verbal promise Obama extracted, offered again, by a regime that has violated every commitment it has ever made, accepted again, by a president who spent eight years calling such promises worthless.
Trump was right about one thing: the JCPOA had fatal weaknesses. Iran kept its enrichment infrastructure, its sunset clauses bought time rather than resolution, and the regime used sanctions relief to fund its imperial ambitions across the region. All of that critique was legitimate.
But you do not fix a bad deal by making a worse one and calling it a revolution.
If this MOU becomes the framework for a final agreement, if Iran keeps its enrichment capacity, pockets the $300 billion, reopens its oil economy, and makes the same promises about not building a bomb that it has made and broken for decades, then Donald Trump will have accomplished something genuinely remarkable: he will have gone to war with Iran, spent American lives and economic stability doing it, and emerged with an agreement weaker than the one he tore up.
He called Obama's deal a catastrophe. History will have something to say about his.
