US and Iran Reach a Deal in Getting a Permanent Deal Latter On
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| Gathering in Tehran earlier this month., Iran affirmed in the agreement that it would never seek to build or procure a nuclear weapon, but the regime has made that promise many times previously. |
Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
Everyone including this posting refers about what happened between Iran and Trump as an agreement. It is true but let remember and agreement is another a deal In this case an agreement means they will try to get a deal down the road. So the most bothersome issues are left alone. The good part is the Straights might open before a formal deal is done.
New York Times
The United States and Iran declared on Sunday that they would cease hostilities for the next 60 days, the first major agreement between the two nations since the start of a war that has gripped the Middle East since late February. For now, however, they left unresolved the critical issue of whether and how Iran would agree to strict limits on its nuclear program.
Leaders of the two nations proclaimed that they had reached the agreement after an intensive flurry of last-minute negotiations complicated by an Israeli airstrike earlier in the day on a Hezbollah stronghold near Beirut.
The framework commits both governments to halting military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, and immediately reopening the Strait of Hormuz, allowing the free flow of oil and other products from the Middle East into global markets, according to officials briefed on the document.
“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all!” President Trump posted on social media late Sunday afternoon, adding: “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”
Under the terms of the agreement, known as the “memorandum of understanding,” the United States is to begin dismantling its naval blockade of Iran immediately, while Iran is to clear the mines it scattered across the Strait of Hormuz and reopen the waterway to commercial shipping, the officials said.
Under the agreement, the roughly two-month-old cease-fire that the two sides reached in April would be extended for another 60 days to allow for talks on a final accord.
The two sides will begin tackling the nuclear issues in detail in a new round of negotiations. Those could begin as soon as Friday in Geneva, where Iran and American officials, including Vice President JD Vance, will also sign Sunday’s accord in person.
Iran affirmed in the agreement that it would never seek to build or procure a nuclear weapon, but the regime has made that promise many times previously, including in the deal signed with the United States under President Barack Obama in 2015.
Neither government has released the text of the agreement, but the terms seem a long way from the “unconditional surrender” that Mr. Trump had demanded early in the war, which began with U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Feb. 28. In the end, the Iranians withstood a heavy assault from both nations, and endured the loss of their leadership. Yet while Iran’s economy and military industrial base were both severely damaged, the regime remained standing. Iran maintains a substantial stockpile of ballistic weapons and, at the same time, the United States has burned through its own munitions supplies to an alarming extent.
The political costs of the war to Mr. Trump also remain unsettled: Many supporters have expressed disappointment that a candidate who ran for president on the promise of no new wars in fact started one — and is apparently ending one inconclusively. Inflation, particularly energy costs, have weighed on consumers as midterm elections approach. Polls have found the war broadly unpopular, further diminishing the president’s already-low approval rating. Republicans running for office have been eager to put the conflict behind them.
The Trump administration hopes the next phase of technical talks will result in Iran’s committing to destroy its nuclear program and hand its near-bomb-grade enriched uranium over to the United States to be diluted and removed from the country. The Trump team also envisions a strict enforcement program, but the history of nuclear diplomacy with Iran suggests that these issues will not be easy or quick to resolve.
The entire structure of the agreement rests on profound mutual suspicion. Briefing reporters on Friday, a senior U.S. official underscored that under the structure of the deal, sanctions against Iran would only be removed, step by step, if Iran fulfilled its obligations, such as handing over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and dismantling its nuclear facilities.
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| People standing in a street, some embracing, in front of a damaged building near cars and other vehicles on a street. |
An Israeli strike near Beirut on Sunday nearly derailed the agreement hours before it was announced.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
That mutual distrust was on raw display in the final hours of deal-making on Sunday, when Israeli warplanes struck what they described as Hezbollah positions in a southern neighborhood of Beirut, killing three people and wounding 16, according to Lebanese health authorities. The strike landed just before Mr. Trump’s team was expecting to put its signature to the Iran agreement, and it touched off a frantic round of back-channel messaging between Washington and Tehran as American officials braced for an Iranian reprisal that could have collapsed the cease-fire and the agreement.
Lebanon has proved to be one of the thorniest pieces of any settlement. For peace to take hold there, Washington would need to press Israel to wind down its campaign while Tehran reined in Hezbollah, which it has long armed and bankrolled — two outcomes neither side can fully guarantee. Each is a potential trip wire for the broader deal.
The episode also exposed the widening rift between Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, as diverging national interests between the longtime allies become more stark. The two nations had attacked Iran together twice, the recent war beginning with strikes that killed Iran’s top leaders, including the former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In blunt terms, the president told Axios in a phone interview on Sunday that he was furious over the timing of the Beirut strikes and that the Israeli leader had shown “no judgment,” adding an expletive for emphasis. Mr. Trump said he had made his anger plain to Mr. Netanyahu directly, even as he insisted the deal would still be signed on Sunday. And in Israel, details of the proposed terms had begun surfacing in the media, drawing sharp criticism from figures across the political spectrum. The prime minister and the government have described the current deal as a misguided American move that leaves Israel open to continuing threats from Iran. It also does not meet Mr. Netanyahu’s rationales for the war, including an overthrow of the regime and certain destruction of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Iran seized on the strikes early in the day as evidence of American unreliability and of the deep mistrust likely to dog the difficult negotiations ahead.
Mr. Trump warned Tehran against retaliating even as he considered offering quicker relief to Iran’s battered economy to keep it at the table, according to people briefed on the discussions. Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, charged that the attack laid bare Washington’s inability to make good on its own commitments about restraining Israel — and questioned on social media whether there was any point in pressing forward.
Working to hold the agreement together, a delegation from Qatar had traveled to Tehran to help shepherd the deal to completion. Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, said the last-minute diplomacy lasted 15 straight hours with Qataris mediating messages between Tehran and Washington.
Iran had defined targeting Beirut as a red line and said any agreement between the adversaries must include an e
nd to the conflict in Lebanon. The news of Israel’s attack on Sunday sent Iranian officials into a tailspin, and Iran’s leaders were divided on how they should respond, three Iranian officials said.
Revolutionary Guards commanders ordered the armed forces to prepare missiles to fire toward Israel. President Masoud Pezeshkian called for restraint, telling the generals that if Iran responded, Israel would surely retaliate, and that would suck Iran into a trap set by Mr. Netanyahu to derail the deal.
Mr. Ghalibaf told the Qataris that Iran planned to attack Israel and would suspend signing of the agreement, the officials said. Mr. Trump then intervened, urging Iran to hold back and promising that once the deal was signed, Israel would halt attacks on Lebanon, the officials added.
The agreement was reached shortly after midnight local time in Iran, on Monday, because Iranian officials were adamant that they would not finalize the peace deal on President Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday, according to the three officials. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing sensitive issues, said the seven-and-a-half-hour time difference allowed both countries to stick to their narrative that the deal was signed or not signed on Sunday.
Mr. Ghalibaf and Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, will travel to Geneva to sign the agreement with Mr. Vance in the highest-level face-to-face engagement between Tehran and Washington in 47 years, according to three Iranian officials. Tehran and Washington ended diplomatic relations after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran when American diplomats were taken hostage. The agreement will also say that Iran and the United States respect each other’s sovereignty and will not meddle in each other’s domestic affairs, according to Mr. Araghchi.
The difficult negotiations still to come will test how far America’s Gulf allies are willing to go in remaking the region and welcoming Iran into its economy. Many already do business with Tehran out of public view, but openly folding Iran into the regional economy — whether all at once or in stages — would represent a far more consequential shift.
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