What a disaster the war against Iran has been for Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the United States and Iran signed on June 17 has formally brought a halt to the devastating war. Yet, as the ink dries on the 14-point preliminary framework, the reality of the document stands in stark contrast to the grandiose, megalomaniac rhetoric that defined the start of the conflict.
Only a handful of analysts and scholars that I know of foresaw what is now unfolding, stressing the realities of Iran’s resilience in the face of international pressure for decades. I was one of them: back in 2012, I warned that there could be no military solution to curbing Iran’s nuclear programme and noted that the US not only knew this, but had warned Israel that this would be the case.
When Trump and Netanyahu launched the initial military campaign on February 28, the objective was explicitly stated: the complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme, an end to Tehran’s support for regional proxies such as Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas – and regime change. But the text of the MoU reveals a profound pivot from those aims, at least as far as the White House is concerned.
Ultimately, the agreement marks the final collapse of Pax Americana in the Persian Gulf region and highlights the resilience of Iranian state sovereignty against external pressure. At the onset of the war, both Washington and Tel Aviv projected absolute confidence in their military capabilities.
Following initial waves of brutal strikes and a campaign involving more than 900 targets, both leaders repeatedly asserted that the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities were fundamentally broken.
Trump regularly claimed that victory was just around the corner, maintaining – erroneously – that Iran had “nothing left in a military sense”. Weeks into the campaign, he declared that the US military would “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground” until it was “totally”, again, obliterated.
Promising the Iranian public that their rulers would soon be gone, Trump insisted he was successfully steering the country toward “regime change”. As the first strikes landed on Iran, he called on the people to rise up and seize control of institutions. Netanyahu echoed these exact sentiments, framing the conflict as a definitive campaign to forcibly reshape the geopolitical architecture of the region.
But intelligence assessments and events on the ground quickly exposed these claims as foolish. Despite severe structural damage, Iran retained its strategic depth, adapting by moving equipment and launching retaliatory drone and missile strikes across the region.
Rather than causing the regime to collapse, the external aggression resulted in a hardening of the state structure.
What’s in the deal
The terms of the MoU demonstrate that Washington was ultimately forced to negotiate with Tehran as an equal sovereign power, rather than a defeated adversary accepting terms of capitulation.
The agreement directly contradicts the initial war aims of the US-Israeli coalition across three major pillars. First, the framework explicitly binds the US to respect Iran’s territorial integrity and abstain from internal interference.
For an administration that spent months demanding regime change, this clause serves as a legal acknowledgment of the Islamic Republic’s permanence. It calls to mind the Algiers accords of 1981, when the US agreed to the unfreezing of Iranian assets and non-intervention in Iran’s affairs in return for 52 American hostages held since the revolution in 1979.
Faced with the reality of an intact Iranian government, Trump reversed his rhetoric at the G7 summit. Claiming that “I never cared about regime change”, the US president pivoted to describing the new Iranian negotiators as “rational, strong, and smart”.
The MoU also mandates the immediate lifting of the US naval blockade and the implementation of emergency Treasury Department waivers to allow the resumption of Iranian crude oil exports. It also signals the unfreezing of up to US$100 billion (£75 billion) in restricted Iranian assets and the creation of a $300 billion international reconstruction fund for economic development.
From a critical perspective, this demonstrates that economic blockades are ultimately unsustainable when met with asymmetrical regional deterrence. Again, this should not have been new to the US government – it’s something that we have researched and written about for years.
As I argued as early as in 2011 on a flagship show on Al Jazeera, sanctions, gunboat diplomacy and even war don’t work. Iranian society is too connected and the economy and the state too agile. And, as we now know, Tehran’s threat to close down the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway, should have been seen by Iran’s adversaries as a potent deterrent. Hopefully, decision-makers will learn their lessons from this ill-fated war.
Indeed, perhaps the most notable aspect of the MoU is what it leaves out. There is no mention of Iran dismantling its ballistic missile programme. Nor is there a requirement for Iran to sever ties with its regional proxies. Additionally, the ceasefire explicitly covers “all fronts,” effectively mandating a halt to hostilities in Lebanon – a point of major friction for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has vowed to maintain an Israeli security zone in the south.
Geopolitical shift
So this deal indicates a structural shift in regional politics. By launching a high-intensity campaign and failing to achieve either the destruction of Iran’s military capabilities or the toppling of its government, the US and Israel have inadvertently demonstrated the limits of their military power. No propaganda by lobbyists and diasporic pro-war monarchists can change the hard truths of scientific inquiry.
The world is transitioning rapidly into an increasingly non-polar, certainly post-western order. The MoU will stand as a historical marker where the rhetoric of superpower might surrendered to the practical necessity of diplomatic accommodation.
And yes: we’ve been predicting this for a long time, too.
