The US-Iran MoU looks at managing the pain rather than ending the war
When US President Donald Trump and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf put an electronic pen to paper on a 14-point memorandum of understanding (MoU)
When US President Donald Trump and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf put an electronic pen to paper on a 14-point memorandum of understanding (MoU) in June, it was supposed to halt a 109-day war between the two countries. Mediated heavily by Pakistan and Qatar, the framework lifts the US naval blockade on Iran in exchange for Tehran reopening the vital Strait of Hormuz, after a bout of economic warfare that caused global energy prices to skyrocket and prompted market instability. Despite this, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz remains volatile. While the number of tit-for-tat attacks between the US and Iran has markedly decreased since the MoU was signed, they have not stopped entirely, with clashes on Friday and Saturday between the two sides. As Washington and Tehran enter a 60-day window to negotiate a permanent settlement to the conflict, a critical question looms: Is the MoU a genuine step towards a lasting peace, or just a temporary mechanism to put the conflict on hold? Analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera view this as an “agreement of the compelled” – a truce born on mutual pain and not a movement towards trust-building. The threshold of mutual pain In conflict resolution theory, warring parties rarely come to the negotiating table seeking peace; they arrive when they hit a “mutually hurting stalemate”, as appears to be the case with the US and Iran. Khalid al-Jaber, director of the Middle East Council for Global Affairs, said that the three-month war reshaped the region through open state-to-state conflict, devastating infrastructure and disrupting global supply chains from Asia to Europe. During the war – beginning February 28 and officially paused when the MoU was signed on June 17 – approximately 7,200 missiles were fired, with nearly 80 percent targeting civilian infrastructure, according to al-Jaber.
This reflected an Iranian strategy to raise the cost of the war for the US and the region by directly targeting Arab Gulf cities, he added. As the war dragged on, the US also became increasingly susceptible to domestic politics and the global economic fallout, exposing the stark limitations of military might, Nabil Khoury, a former US diplomat, told Al Jazeera. “This war showed the limits of power, the limits of using force. Power does not mean impact,” Khoury said. “You can have the strongest army in the world, but if you cannot change the policy of a smaller, weaker state, your power has not translated into real-world impact.” State vs non-state: The Lebanon and Gaza contrast Analysts say there is a fundamental structural distinction between the current US-Iran pact and the 2025 ceasefire agreements in Gaza and Lebanon. The October 2025 Gaza ceasefire deal outlined a phased withdrawal and prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas, which was supposed to lessen the violence in the Palestinian territory. But during the 260-day period since then, Israel has committed 3,465 violations, killing 1,045 Palestinians, injuring 3,380, with 113 others detained, according to reports from the Gaza Government Media Office The US-brokered November 2024 Lebanon ceasefire agreement has also been repeatedly breached by Israel. Analysts say that Israel has used the ceasefire framework to shape security arrangements in its favour, with hundreds of Israeli air strikes on Lebanon since it was signed, killing at least 4,500 people there. Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, points out that the Gaza and Lebanon ceasefires are inherently imperfect because they involve non-state actors with “fragmented command structures, and multiple competing centres of power”. In contrast, the MoU between the US and Iran shows “clear chains of command and the ability to negotiate directly”.
The BriefWire