the edit, vol. 38
the deal that keeps almost happening
Today, Vice President JD Vance is in Switzerland, at a luxury resort overlooking Lake Lucerne, trying to advance a peace process that has now produced a signed agreement, a reopened strait, a closed strait, a reopened strait again, and a ceasefire in Lebanon that does not appear to be a ceasefire.
Between March and June, there have been at least 38 separate occasions on which President Trump said a deal with Iran was imminent. A memorandum of understanding was finally signed on June 17 — not in the originally planned ceremony in Geneva, but at a gala dinner in Versailles, in the middle of the G7 summit, between courses. Iran's president signed his copy separately, in Tehran, the next day.
Three days later, Iran said it was closing the Strait of Hormuz again. The reason given had nothing to do with the strait itself — it was retaliation for continued Israeli strikes in Lebanon, a conflict Iran is not formally a party to under the agreement it just signed.
This is not a story about whether the deal is good or bad, or whether either side is negotiating in good faith. It is a story about what a peace process looks like when it is structurally unable to produce peace — and why that structure, not any single actor's bad behavior, is the more interesting problem.
what was actually signed
The Islamabad Memorandum, as it is formally known, is a fourteen-point framework — not a treaty, not a final settlement, but what diplomats call a memorandum of understanding: a statement of intent that establishes a process rather than an outcome.
Its substance is significant.
The first clause declares an immediate and permanent end to military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon.
The U.S. commits to lifting its naval blockade within 30 days and withdrawing forces from Iran's proximity. Iran commits to allowing toll-free commercial passage through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days.
The U.S. Treasury will issue sanctions waivers for Iranian oil exports.
Frozen Iranian assets — reported between $24 and $25 billion — will be made available.
A reconstruction plan worth at least $300 billion is referenced for the post-war period. Iran reaffirms it will never develop a nuclear weapon, with its enriched uranium stockpile to be downblended on-site under IAEA supervision.
What the document does not resolve is, in some ways, more significant than what it does. It contains no enforcement mechanism for the nuclear commitments. It does not address Iran's ballistic missile program. It does not mention Iran's network of regional allies — Hezbollah, the Houthis, the various militias across Iraq and Syria that have functioned as extensions of Iranian power for two decades. These were not oversights. They were the issues judged too difficult to resolve in the time available, deliberately deferred to the 60-day negotiation period that is now underway in Switzerland.
A senior U.S. official, speaking to Time, captured the document's actual legal weight with unusual candor: "Either side can walk away at any time until you really have a fulsome binding deal." The MoU is not a ceasefire in the conventional sense. It is a structured invitation to keep negotiating, with no penalty specified for either party choosing not to.
the party that never signed
The single fact most likely to determine whether this process succeeds is also the fact that has received the least sustained attention: Israel was never part of the negotiation.
The MoU's first clause declares an end to military operations "on all fronts, including in Lebanon." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected that characterization within hours of the text becoming public, stating plainly that Israel was not bound by the agreement and would "preserve its freedom of action" against Hezbollah. Israeli forces struck Beirut twice during the negotiation period — once nearly derailing the talks entirely, and again this past weekend, killing more than a dozen people in a strike that occurred hours after diplomats had told CBS News that Israel and Hezbollah had separately reached their own ceasefire.
This is the structural flaw that no amount of skillful diplomacy between Washington and Tehran can fix: the United States negotiated commitments on Lebanon's behalf, and on terms that implicated Israel's military conduct, without Israel at the table. Israel's position has been consistent and unambiguous — it considers itself a sovereign actor pursuing its own security interests against Hezbollah, indifferent to what the U.S. and Iran agreed to in Versailles.
Iran, in turn, has used Lebanon as the lever that keeps the entire agreement conditional. Iranian negotiators have stated explicitly that Trump signed the MoU, and that if he cannot ensure compliance with the Lebanon ceasefire — despite that compliance depending on a government Iran does not control — then the rest of the memorandum is in question. The Strait of Hormuz closure that followed this weekend's Beirut strikes was not a negotiating position on the strait. It was retaliation for a conflict in a different country, deployed as leverage in a third negotiation entirely.
a lever detached from its cause
This is worth sitting with, because it represents something close to a new model of coercive diplomacy: a chokepoint carrying roughly 20 percent of the world's seaborne oil, weaponized not in response to a dispute about the strait itself, but as general-purpose leverage for an entirely separate conflict.
On June 18, AXSMarine recorded 25 verified commercial vessel crossings through the strait — the highest single-day count since April 18, and more than five times the average daily level from earlier in the month. Two days later, Iran said it was closing the strait again. U.S. Central Command disputed that Iran has the capacity to actually control the waterway, stating it remains open. Whether or not Iran can enforce a closure, the market reaction — and the willingness of shipping insurers to write policies for vessels transiting the strait — depends on perceived risk, not verified fact. Iran does not need to physically close Hormuz to extract a cost from keeping the threat alive.
This decoupling of leverage from cause is the more durable lesson of this conflict, regardless of how the current negotiation resolves. A nation does not need to win a military confrontation to gain coercive power — it needs control, or even contested control, over a chokepoint significant enough that the rest of the world cannot afford prolonged uncertainty about it. The strait has become a dial that can be turned for reasons that have nothing to do with the strait, by a party whose underlying military position has been substantially degraded.
the architecture of the negotiation
The structure of the talks themselves is also worth examining, because it reflects how this kind of diplomacy is now conducted — and how different that is from the institutional channels that resolved comparable conflicts in past decades.
The American delegation has rotated between Vice President Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner — the president's son-in-law, holding no formal government title comparable to his negotiating role. The Iranian delegation has been led by parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, operating under visible constraint from factions aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which reportedly withheld approval of the preliminary deal even after American and Pakistani officials had described it as finalized. Pakistan has served as the primary mediator throughout, with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt facilitating at different stages.
This is not the UN Security Council issuing a binding resolution, or career diplomats working a decades-long bilateral channel. It is a rotating cast of envoys, a head of government acting as personal mediator, and a signing ceremony that occurred at a state dinner in Versailles because the originally planned venue in Geneva could not be arranged in time. The MoU itself anticipates this informality will eventually need to be formalized — it specifies that the final agreement, once reached, will be endorsed by a binding UN Security Council resolution. The institutional architecture is being built backward: informal deal first, formal ratification later, if it happens at all.
There is no inherently wrong way to negotiate an end to a war. Pakistan's mediation has been genuinely substantive, and the personal relationships envoys build at resorts in Switzerland may matter more to outcomes than formal institutional channels ever did. But informal architecture has a specific vulnerability: nothing holds it together when a party decides to walk away except the personal credibility of the individuals in the room. There is no institution whose authority is damaged by collapse — only people whose reputations are.
what 38 imminent deals actually signals
Return to the number that we opened with: at least 38 occasions between March and June on which a deal was described as imminent.
There are two ways to read that pattern. The first is cynical: that neither side has a strong incentive to actually conclude the negotiation, because the state of perpetual near-resolution serves each of them better than either war or peace would. For the United States, an ongoing process generates the appearance of diplomatic progress without the political cost of a deal's specific terms being finalized and judged. For Iran, the negotiation period delays sanctions enforcement, keeps a portion of frozen assets in active discussion, and avoids the moment when the regime would have to choose between accepting humiliating terms or restarting a war it has already lost militarily.
The second reading is more structural and less cynical: that the issues being negotiated — Iran's nuclear program, its missile arsenal, its regional proxy network, the unresolved status of Lebanon, the question of who polices compliance — are genuinely difficult enough that 60-day negotiation windows were never going to be sufficient, and the repeated near-misses reflect honest difficulty rather than bad faith.
Both readings can be true simultaneously, in different proportions for different actors. What is harder to dispute is the practical effect: a war that nominally ended in February has produced, by June, a memorandum that explicitly preserves either side's right to walk away, a third-party combatant who never agreed to anything, and a chokepoint controlling a fifth of the world's oil that opens and closes according to a conflict in a different country.
what diplomacy actually requires
There is a version of diplomacy that produces durable settlements: all relevant parties at the table, enforcement mechanisms with real consequences, and institutional ratification that survives the political fortunes of the individuals who negotiated it. The Camp David Accords, flawed as they were, bound Israel and Egypt through formal treaty obligations that outlasted both Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. The Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian war through NATO-enforced provisions that did not depend on any single envoy's continued involvement.
What is unfolding in Switzerland this week does not yet have those characteristics. It has urgency, genuine diplomatic effort from multiple governments, and a framework substantial enough that it has already reduced the intensity of direct U.S.-Iran conflict. What it does not have is a credible mechanism for binding the one party — Israel — whose actions can unilaterally collapse the entire structure, or a clear theory of what happens when, not if, one side concludes that walking away costs less than staying.
Vance said before departing that his priorities in Switzerland are to establish the structure of ongoing talks, make progress on the nuclear issue, and achieve a ceasefire in Lebanon — three goals that, after four months of negotiation, remain exactly where they started.
A war can end with a signature. Whether it stays ended depends on whether everyone whose actions matter actually held the pen, and right now one of them never did.
