How to Understand the Memorandum of Undoing
A war that set out to undo Iran’s power ended by undoing its own objectives and easing the pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran before the final bargain had begun.
It took less than four months for a war of absolute demands to collapse into an agreement of postponed decisions. During the conflict, President Trump declared that there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” and later warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” By June 17, the U.S. and Iran had signed an interim memorandum declaring an immediate and permanent end to military operations while opening a sixty-day window to negotiate a final agreement. The sixty-day limit governs the initial negotiation period, not the duration of the ceasefire.
The U.S. President signed it at Versailles, of all places, hosted by the French President he had mocked throughout the war, down to the jab that his wife “treats him extremely badly.” That Macron hosted him anyway tells you how eager Europe was to contain the conflict.
But nothing sat as strangely as the Vice President’s language. He wanted Iran to “behave like a normal country,” to rejoin the international community, to become, he hoped, “successful.” Touching language, if the same administration had not, weeks earlier, warned California law enforcement of unverified reporting that Iran had allegedly aspired to attack the state using drones, and if Iran had not, before the June 2025 U.S. strikes, messaged the President threatening “sleeper-cell terror inside the U.S.” if he attacked. Iran went, in the space of a season, from terror sponsor to fixer-upper.
Read against the administration’s own stated aims, the memorandum is a catalog of undoings. The MOU is, in the most literal sense, a Memorandum of Undoing: nearly everything the administration said the war was for. Every maximal promise the war made, the memorandum either narrowed, deferred, or abandoned, with the Vice President now granting that Iran, “like any state,” retains a right to self-defense and need not give up the missile capability the President had vowed to raze. A Memorandum of Undoing is, after all, the easiest kind of document to undo. And it came undone in pieces:
First Undoing: The Nuclear File
The objective contracted until it fit the result.
“They will never have a nuclear weapon. I’ll say it again, they can never have a nuclear weapon.”, the President, February 28, opening the war.
“Most importantly, we have a deal that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”, the President, June 11, announcing the deal.
Set the two sentences side by side and you see the same words, but the first took the country to war and the second declared it won. The text supplies no complete mechanism to close the gap between them. It leaves the rules governing enrichment to a final agreement that does not yet exist and preserves the interim status quo, while the administration recites the original promise over it as though nothing had moved.
Its firmest operational commitment is the on-site downblending of enriched uranium under IAEA supervision, and experts argued that downblending on Iranian soil could be manipulated by the regime, because dilution without removal leaves the material in Tehran’s hands. Diluted stock can be enriched again; stock that stays in the country keeps the path back open in a way that removal never would, and low-enriched uranium already represents most of the technical work of reaching weapons grade. The nonproliferation analyst Andrea Stricker of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies urged the administration to reject precisely this arrangement, calling the request to downblend in-country “a deliberate gambit aimed at prolonging Tehran’s access to the material while minimizing concessions.” The memorandum does provide for IAEA-supervised downblending and a monitoring mechanism; what it leaves unresolved is most of the detail that would make either meaningful.
Much of what would turn the promise into a fact, the detailed timetable, permissible enrichment level, quantities, verification architecture, enforcement rules, and penalties, remains unwritten. The nuclear question the war was fought to settle was not settled. It was deferred to a sixty-day negotiation period and, in the meantime, announced in the exact words of the original threat.
Second Undoing: The Missiles
The goal shrank to fit what the bombing could reach.
“We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.”, the President, February 28.
“Countries don’t give up the right of self-defense... we do expect that as part of the final deal, they are not going to be able to build the kind of missiles that can broadly threaten the entire world.”, the Vice President, defending the ceasefire deal in June.
Razing Iran’s missile industry to the ground was the goal the President named in February. Curbing Iran’s ballistic missiles had been an American demand since the 2018 maximum pressure conditions, which called on Tehran to halt the development and launching of nuclear-capable missile systems and to end its proliferation of missiles to the proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the militias, that the war was meant to sever.
What the Vice President defended in June is far smaller, and the memorandum itself contains no missile clause at all. Vance’s position is a prospective negotiating stance, not a concession written into the agreement: that Iran, like any state, retains a right to self-defense, and that the deal aims only to stop it from building missiles that “can broadly threaten the entire world.” The February position razes Iran’s missile capability to the ground. The June position accepts the capability and haggles over range. The administration covered the distance in under four months without appearing to notice the target had moved.
Third Undoing: The Strait
Major leverage was suspended before the final bargain.
“The Hormuz Strait must be immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions.”, the President, late May.
“We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it. It’s a beautiful thing.”, the President, April 8, on taking a cut of Iran’s toll.
The oil waivers come at the start of the sixty days, not the end, which means one of the largest pieces of pressure the U.S. held is suspended before the talks meant to settle the final nuclear bargain have even opened. Under the 2015 agreement, sanctions relief followed verification; Implementation Day came only after the IAEA confirmed Iran had finished the specified work. Here the relief precedes the bargain over the issue for which the war was ostensibly fought. As for the Strait of Hormuz, Iran guarantees no-charge passage for sixty days and no more; the text contains no durable toll-free guarantee, and the text provides no explicit post-sixty-day bar against Iran charging for or impeding passage again the moment it calculates it can absorb the consequences, the calculation it has just watched pay off.
A closure at Hormuz convulses global energy markets, but the physical flows principally serve Asian importers. The EIA estimates that 84 percent of the crude oil and condensate moving through the strait in 2024 went to Asian markets, against roughly 2 percent of total U.S. petroleum-liquids consumption. Washington poured in the lives and the money to reopen a waterway whose steady flow matters most to its chief rival.
The three hundred billion dollars is the most conspicuous promise in the deal and the one no one can verify. The text commits the U.S. and its regional partners to a plan of “at least” that sum but names no contributor and leaves the mechanism to a final deal that does not yet exist. What fills the vacuum is attribution without accountability: Axios traces the concept to Qatar, which now denies putting in money; Reuters, on a single anonymous source, reports more than half already committed, all private, all contingent on a deal not yet struck. Even the supposed backers will not vouch for it; the Saudi foreign minister, asked about the fund, said he had no details and that trust with Iran would have to be rebuilt first. A figure this large, unsupported by named investors or documented capital commitments, is not yet a fund. It is a number doing the work of one.
Fourth Undoing: The People
The people the war was supposed to be for were left out of it.
“To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand... When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”, the President, February 28.
Of everything the war was sold as, this was the part that made it moral. The missiles and the enrichment were strategic; the promise to the Iranian people was the one that gave the war a conscience, the claim that this was a liberation and not merely a demolition. It was also the only war aim with nothing to bomb, nothing to verify, and no leverage attached, which made it the easiest thing in the agreement to abandon. So it was abandoned. The memorandum mentions the Iranian people nowhere. There is no amnesty in it, no protection, no clause on the detained or the condemned, nothing that reaches a single Iranian the war claimed to be fought for. What it contains instead is a mutual noninterference commitment, a pledge, in effect, to leave the regime to its own population.
During the bombing campaign, it was clear that the aims of the administration shifted, especially after the threats to destroy civilization, and even those who romanticized the bombs falling from the sky as liberation realized there was no real exit once the talks started. But it must have stung to see the regime get a reprieve that the people of Iran never had. The memorandum waives oil sanctions, commits Washington to make frozen assets usable, and promises the staged termination of the rest, and it must have added salt to the wound that the same document carries no protection for the people being rounded up by the thousands.
The surviving regime they were urged to overthrow is now positioned to recover its revenue through the very process that dropped their cause. And the repression never paused: in a May 28 report, Amnesty International documented more than six thousand arbitrary arrests and at least thirty-nine politically motivated executions, including sixteen protesters, nine dissidents, ten accused of spying for the U.S. or Israel, and four of armed rebellion. The hour of their freedom arrived, and it belonged to the people holding the ropes. The dissidents who mistook American bombs for rescue were left to be processed as agents of a foreign power, the deal had just shaken hands with.
Fifth Undoing: The Proxies
Ambiguity became a victory narrative.
“We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.”, the President, February 28.
“We didn’t meet out of desperation, Iran did. They are FINISHED!”, the President, June 19, two days after signing.
“Everything we sought to achieve through military action, we obtained several times over through negotiation; it was not even comparable.”, Iran’s lead negotiator, that same week, on the same document.
Each side called the same text a win, which is predictable, but each read the Lebanon language to mean what it needed, and the memorandum was written loosely enough to let them. Iranian officials said they folded Lebanon in deliberately and read the clause as binding Israel, claiming there is no stability in the region “without ending the occupation and Israel’s compliance with international law.” Hezbollah read it the same way and thanked Tehran for compelling Israel to halt operations “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” Yet the clause only ends operations and affirms Lebanese sovereignty; it binds no one who did not sign. The group, which called the deal a “big victory”, is reading into the text a guarantee it does not contain. A clause everyone has already declared a victory is a clause no one has yet had to define.
Notice how Iran folded Hezbollah into a US-Iran agreement at all. Lebanon is a separate conflict, with separate parties, none of whom signed this memorandum. Yet Iran is treating it as a condition, and the parties themselves now speak of Lebanon as one of Iran’s fronts: Hezbollah addressed its thanks to Tehran for halting a war it described as part of the agreement to end the war against Iran. In doing so, Tehran sets the terms: implementation now answers to events in Lebanon that Tehran can invoke whenever it suits. And if Hezbollah, why not the rest? Nothing about the logic stops at one proxy. The same lever works for the Houthis, for the militias in Iraq, for any front Iran can point to on a given week.
And the leverage is not free-floating; it runs on money. Iran’s reach into the region has always been funded reach, the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Shia militias in Iraq, all of it sustained by a state that chooses the network over its own people. So the economic relief at the center of this deal is not neutral. The waived oil sanctions, the unfrozen assets, and the reconstruction billions, whatever their stated purpose, can free resources for the network the administration had promised to weaken. The war that named cutting Iran’s support for its proxies as a goal instead risks handing Tehran the means to deepen it. That is the real cost, and it is not paid in Tehran. It is paid in Beirut, in Sanaa, in Baghdad, by the people who live under the guns this money keeps loaded.
The Red Sea showed it didn’t have to be this way. There, the U.S. and the Houthis reached their own understanding and walled it off: the deal covered attacks on each other and on U.S. vessels while explicitly excluding Israel, so the Houthis kept firing at Israel, Israel kept firing back, and none of it touched the US-Houthi arrangement, because Washington refused to let a third party’s war become its problem. Here it did the opposite. It signed an agreement Iran can hold hostage to a fight the U.S. is not even in.
The Administration’s Case for the Deal
The administration’s case had been stated before. Iran’s command structure is severely degraded; the energy crisis made every additional week of war more costly; the concessions are interim and reversible; and the memorandum buys an immediate end to the fighting in exchange for inspections and a sixty-day path to a final deal. On that reading the war was a hard bargain that bought de-escalation on terms that can still be tightened.
But the deal front-loads what is easy to give and defers what was hard to win, and that sequence is the whole problem. The relief arrives now; the questions the war was fought to settle, enrichment, missiles, proxies, the long-term status of the strait, are pushed into negotiations that may never produce a binding text and that Iran has every incentive to draw out. A waiver is easy to revoke on paper and far harder to reimpose once the markets have settled and the partners have moved on. What the U.S. handed over takes effect now. What it kept is a promise to argue later.
Critics have noted that this is not so different from the Obama deal. But the Obama deal was reached without a war, and this one was reached with one. That is the catch. A war is the most serious thing a country can choose to do, and the minimum it owes its own people, and the people on the other end of the bombing, is a stated objective against which its conduct and its result can be judged. This war never had one that held still long enough to be judged. What did it advance? What is more secure now than before it began? The memorandum is not an answer. It is a record of their absence, an objective dissolving under pressure just as the pressure that might have held it in place was lifted.
I have written before about maximum pressure and minimum strategy, and what we have now is the result. The terms may still improve at the table, but Iran keeps its nuclear program, its missiles, its government, and its grip on its own people, and beyond its borders, it has come away with more room to work, not less, a settlement that lets it consolidate its network and a new lever over Lebanon it can pull whenever it suits. The region is no safer than the day the bombing began.
War is a very costly way to end up where you started. Because the memorandum is nonbinding, much of it may not survive the sixty-day negotiating period. That fragility is precisely why its concessions must be recorded now. Set beside the abandoned promises on the nuclear file, the missiles, the regional proxies, and the Iranian people, the agreement shows what Washington was prepared to trade away not after achieving its objectives, but in place of them. This is more than a ledger of diplomatic compromise. It is an accounting of the void at the center of American foreign policy: not a shortage of power, but the absence of any durable idea of what that power is for. The administration went to war with absolute demands and returned with a memorandum of undoing, accepting the appearance of victory because it had no strategy by which victory could be measured. Washington can destroy, compel, and bargain; it cannot hold an objective still long enough to know whether it has won.
So what, in the end, did the war undo, if not its own purpose?