Donald Trump signed a useless piece of paper called a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran but there is no strategic value to his surrender

An interesting point of view. In summary, the MOU Donald Trump signed is a useless piece of paper.  If Iran can outlast the Trumpzi crumbling administration, the MOU will be as useless as used toilet paper.  Published in Al Jazeera by Adolfo Franco
Opinion|US-Israel war on Iran

The US-Iran MoU: A mirage of an agreement

Both Washington and Tehran know that current deal will not lead to lasting peace. It is merely a strategic pause.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) the United States and Iran signed is not a peace treaty. It is not even a credible framework for one. A vocal chorus of critics has rushed to portray it as a humiliation – evidence that Donald Trump was manoeuvred into negotiations and extracted a poor deal from a regime that outplayed him.

That reading mistakes a mirage for reality. The Trump administration entered these talks with a precise understanding of what the Iranian regime is, what it wants and what any agreement with it is actually worth. No one in that negotiating team harbors the illusion that Tehran intends to honor commitments that constrain its core ambitions. The MоU is not a peace settlement. It is a mutually understood pause – a tactical intermission chosen by both sides for reasons that have nothing to do with trust and everything to do with time.

The new MoU does not signal that Iran has changed. Its calculus remains what it has always been – survival and expansion, pursued through whatever tactical posture the moment requires. When pressure mounts, Iran negotiates. When pressure eases, Iran advances. Its negotiators are, by all available evidence, prepared to offer assurances they have no intention of keeping. This is not a failure of diplomatic craftsmanship. This is simply the nature of any negotiation with a regime like Iran’s.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Iranian nuclear program. As a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has repeatedly committed to transparent cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. It has repeatedly broken those commitments, blocking inspections, constructing clandestine enrichment facilities, destroying evidence and systematically deceiving the international community. The pattern is not one of occasional noncompliance. It is deliberate, sustained deception in pursuit of a single unwavering objective: the acquisition of a nuclear weapon (although Iran denies this accusation).

A state genuinely committed to civilian nuclear energy has no need for a vast and enormously expensive domestic enrichment program. Nuclear fuel can be purchased – from Russia, among others – at a fraction of the cost and without the international confrontation such a program inevitably provokes.

Iran has chosen the far more costly and dangerous path for one reason: Enrichment is not a means to an end, but the end itself. Its rulers are committed to a nuclear weapon, and that commitment has survived changes in personnel, shifts in rhetoric and decades of pressure.

What this MoU represents is a mutually understood strategic pause, a breathing space both parties have chosen, for entirely different reasons, over immediate confrontation. Iran needs economic relief. A regime facing internal decay and a depleted treasury has strong incentives to buy time, replenish its resources and wait out what it calculates to be a finite window.

Tehran is acutely aware that Trump has roughly two and a half years remaining in office. From its perspective, survival through that period is itself a form of victory.

Washington’s calculus is different in kind. Keeping the Strait of Hormuz open is an immediate, non-negotiable goal – a choked strait means an energy price shock with global consequences. Beyond that, the US has its own repositioning to accomplish. Military inventories drawn down through recent operations are being restocked. Strategic options are being preserved and expanded.

A pause that enables that rebuilding, while avoiding a premature confrontation on unfavorable terms, is not a concession. It is preparation.

The question for Tehran is not whether American resolve exists but whether it can be outlasted. That is a wager the Iranian regime has made before and lost.

The international community will, as usual, observe from a careful distance. Many nations will urge Iran to be stopped while taking few steps to stop it, criticizing US action and inaction with equal facility.

Trump understands this dynamic. It is the foundation of his approach to alliances – the insistence that partners bear proportionate burdens rather than simply drawing on American resolve while contributing little of their own.

The MoU will not resolve the Iranian problem. It was not designed to. When its terms expire or when Iran decides it has served its purpose, the nuclear program will resume its advance, the proxies will be better resourced, and the Strait of Hormuz will once again become a flashpoint.

That outcome is not a possibility. Given Iran’s record, it is a near-certainty.