Why the Iran-US Deal May Be History’s Most Fragile Agreement
- Sanjida Nourin Jhinuk
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
The ink hasn’t even dried, if there’s ink at all. President of the United States Donald Trump declared that the US and Iran have agreed to a peace treaty, which means that free passage will now start through the Strait of Hormuz. It was blocked until February 28 when the US and Israel attacked Iran. Trump characteristically declared it a triumph. “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” he wrote on Truth Social.
However, history is replete with the detritus of agreements which had been hailed well before they even came into being. What the world needs to ask itself is whether the Iran-US agreement is a true solution or rather just a pause for drama masquerading as peace.
To understand what this deal means, one must understand what it cost. The conflict that began on February 28 inflicted extensive damage including the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the opening strikes. For a state whose entire political architecture rests on the office of the Supreme Leader, this was not a tactical loss but a rupture at the very centre of authority.
The proposals of the US Government to Iran included lifting of economic sanctions, rollback of Iran’s nuclear program, restrictions on missiles and resumption of operations in the Strait of Hormuz which serves almost one-fifth of the oil and liquefied natural gas transported around the world.
Pakistan acted as an intermediary in the talks, a role that itself says something about the diplomatic vacuum left behind once traditional brokers such as Oman and Qatar found themselves sidelined by the speed and brutality of the conflict. Islamabad’s involvement reflects a contest playing out beneath the headlines where regional powers are repositioning themselves as indispensable go-betweens for Washington.
Just weeks earlier, Iranian state run television quoted an anonymous official saying Tehran had rejected Washington’s proposals outright declaring, “The end of the war will occur when Iran decides it should end, not when Trump envisions its conclusion.” That defiance did not evaporate overnight.
This is the first uncomfortable truth that the deal was born from military asymmetry. Iran arrived at the negotiating table because its position had been shattered, its air defences degraded, its command structure decapitated and its economy already gasping under years of sanctions.
Underneath the MOU lie structural contradictions that cannot be resolved by any diplomatic document. From the American standpoint, the primary interest is not in the nuclear aspect alone. Washington desires a region of the Middle East where Iran cannot project its power neither via intermediaries nor via uranium enrichment.
Today, Iran controls 440.9 kg of uranium that has been enriched up to 60%. This means only two steps away from the weapons grade level of enrichment which stands at 90%. Both parties have set aside a period of 60 days for reaching an agreement regarding the nuclear issue. That is not easy. Sixty days is barely enough time to verify stockpiles let alone negotiate the far thornier questions of where that enriched uranium goes, who monitors it and what mechanism exists to confirm Iran has not retained a parallel track.
As talks were going on, the American Treasury Department sanctioned the Iranian Oil Sales Department responsible for oil shipments. It is difficult to take a peace process seriously when one signatory continues tightening the economic noose even as the ink, such as it is, dries.
For Iran, the calculus is existential. The identity of the Islamic Republic or and its legitimacy is tied inextricably to opposition to US hegemony. Agreeing to an agreement that will force them to curtail their nuclear programme, restrict their missile capabilities and reopen the strait under US terms would be seen by many as surrender following an onslaught. Tehran has consistently insisted it will not surrender its nuclear programme. For a regime already reeling from the loss of its Supreme Leader, conceding on the nuclear file risks a second, slower kind of collapse.
Then there is Israel. Even as the deal was being finalised, Israel launched air raids on Beirut’s southern suburbs, so alarming the process that Trump himself condemned the strikes, saying they “should have never happened.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated clearly that Israel is not a party to the negotiated deal. This is perhaps the single greatest structural flaw in the entire arrangement.
A ceasefire negotiated between Washington and Tehran means little if the third actor most capable of reigniting the conflict has explicitly excluded itself from its terms. Netanyahu’s government has its own domestic political calculations, its own assessment of when Iran’s nuclear programme crosses an unacceptable threshold and its own history of acting unilaterally when it judges American patience to be a liability. A deal that cannot bind Israel is, in practice, a deal that can be unmade by Israel at any moment of its choosing.
What has actually been agreed is a memorandum of understanding, not a final peace. The formal signing is scheduled for June 19 in Switzerland. After that, 60 days of technical negotiations begin on nuclear down blending, on frozen assets worth $25 billion and on the permanent status of the Strait. Each of these three issues alone has historically taken years to resolve in other contexts, let alone two months under the shadow of a war that only just ended. Some hawks in both Washington and Tel Aviv already fear there will never be a final deal and that the war will end with the nuclear question dangerously unresolved leaving Iran with just enough latent capability to remain a perpetual flashpoint rather than a closed chapter.
The history of US-Iran diplomacy is not encouraging. The 2015 JCPOA painstakingly negotiated, multilaterally endorsed, verified repeatedly by international inspectors as being honoured by Tehran. But it was unilaterally torn apart in 2018 by an American administration that decided the deal was not punitive enough. If a multilateral agreement with the backing of the UN Security Council could be discarded so easily, what guarantees exist today that this far thinner, bilaterally brokered memorandum will outlast the next American election, or the next Israeli strike, or the next Iranian hardliner who rises to power in Tehran’s post-war political landscape?
The most honest answer is: none. This deal is real insofar as bombs have stopped falling and ships are preparing to move through the Strait. That matters enormously for a world already buckling under multiple crises, from Gaza to Ukraine to the broader fraying of the post-war multilateral order. Peace of any kind is preferable to war. But a memorandum of understanding is not a resolution. The structural tensions such as American hegemony, Iranian sovereignty, Israeli security, nuclear ambition and economic desperation have not been negotiated away. They have simply been postponed, parked inside a 60-day window that is far too short to absorb questions this large.
History teaches us that deferred conflicts have a habit of returning, often angrier than before. The Korean War armistice of 1953 was meant to be temporaryand seven decades later the two Koreas remain technically at war. The Iran-US deal may yet be the beginning of something durable. Or it may be another chapter in the long, exhausting cycle of wars that pause but never truly end.
This article written by Sanjida Nourin Jhinuk, an undergraduate International Relations student at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is an emerging writer focusing on geopolitical issues, global politics and international affairs through a historical lens. Her interests include strategic competition, diplomacy, power politics and contemporary global security developments.
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