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The ceasefire deal inked by the United States and Iran on Wednesday, aimed at bringing an end to their costly and destructive war, has been touted a strategic victory by the Islamic Republic – while coming up short on achieving U.S. goals articulated by President Donald Trump.
The agreement grants Iran sizable economic incentives in exchange for opening the Strait of Hormuz and for Tehran’s assurances – as it has done for many years – that it will not develop a nuclear weapon.
Mr. Trump touted the 14-point plan to end the war, which he launched jointly with Israel in a surprise attack against Iran on Feb. 28, while a previous round of negotiations was underway.
The temporary ceasefire agreement reached between the U.S. and Iran is meant to end the war, reopen vital shipping lanes in the Gulf, and address Iran’s nuclear ambitions – at a later time. It includes big economic incentives for Tehran and comes up short on President Donald Trump’s stated goals for starting the war in the first place.
But the provisions of the new memorandum of understanding, or MoU, fall far short of Mr. Trump’s original stated goals of toppling the Islamic Republic: destroying its nuclear program, missile arsenal, and regional network of proxy forces; and forcing Tehran into “unconditional surrender.”
Instead, Iran can immediately begin selling oil, with complete sanctions relief, and access a reconstruction fund of “at least” $300 billion after a final deal is reached that would impose strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program.
The document opens a 60-day window for the U.S. and Iran to address core nuclear and sanctions issues. It commits both sides to the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” and reopens international shipping through the Strait, which was fully open before the war.
Israel was not a party to the deal, and analysts say a key vulnerability is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued fight against the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.
Also unmentioned is Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles, which has been used to repeatedly target Israel and Gulf states hosting U.S. forces. Mr. Trump said on Wednesday it would be “unfair” to leave Iran defenseless, without missiles.
An illustration on the front page of Iran’s conservative Hamshahri daily captured the mood in the Islamic Republic. It showed Mr. Trump literally eating his words, by chewing on paper with a list of initial war objectives, under the headline, “Gone with the wind.”
Tehran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, said Wednesday that the deal proved Iran’s victory. Mr. Qalibaf is the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and one of the highest-ranking officials to avoid assassination during the war.
“In the West, they have described the MoU as America’s defeat,” he told the state-run IRINN channel. “This is their own wording.”
“We obtained through negotiations many times over what we sought to achieve through military actions,” he said. “The two are not even comparable.”
The war reportedly killed at least 3,400 people in Iran alone, sent global energy prices surging, cost the U.S. tens of billions of dollars, and depleted American air-defense missile stocks.
The results of the MoU can’t yet be compared with the 2015 nuclear deal signed under President Barack Obama, which imposed strict, carefully monitored limits on Iran’s nuclear program and was signed by a total of seven countries alongside the European Union. Mr. Trump described that as the “worst deal in history,” tore it up in 2018, and has vowed that a new deal will be a much stronger “wall” that will prevent Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon.
For this 60-day ceasefire, Iran insisted on including an Israel-Hezbollah truce in Lebanon. Iranian officials say a “red line” for them is a renewal of Israeli strikes against targets in and around Beirut. Israeli officials, however, say they will not withdraw Israeli forces from southern Lebanon or halt their attacks.
“Even in the very best scenario, where this memorandum leads to a comprehensive deal and sanctions are removed, as long as the conflict between Iran and Israel is there – and that means as long as the Islamic Republic is there – the Israelis are not going to stop, Iran is not going to stop,” says Hamidreza Azizi, an Iran expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.
Lebanon is the most likely flash point, Mr. Azizi says, and more broadly, the Iran-Israel conflict might “go back to the gray zone area” of mutual, low-level provocation that prevailed for years before 2023.
“This trauma of the past year, two wars initiated right in the middle of negotiations, is still there – so there is no trust, they think it could happen at any moment, that Trump changes his mind and restarts this war,” he adds.
Indeed, speaking near Paris, where Mr. Trump signed the interim deal during a visit to the Palace of Versailles, the president once again threatened Iranians with the use of military force.
“If they don’t honor that, we’ll probably go back to bombing them until they honor it, you know? It’s amazing what bombs can do,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday.
Mr. Trump indicated that economic pressure helped force his hand.
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” he said. “If you kept this going, that could have happened.”
Signing on behalf of Iran, President Masoud Pezeshkian called the MoU a “historic document.”
“Peace will be achieved in the shadow of mutual respect,” he wrote on social media.
Also included in the text of the MoU is free passage through the Strait of Hormuz for commercial vessels “for 60 days only,” after which Iran “will conduct dialogue” with Oman, and other Gulf states, about “future administration and maritime services” – a nod to Iran’s new wartime demand to charge fees for safe passage.
“Trump himself is now saying he buckled under the pressure of Hormuz,” noted Haviv Rettig Gur, a conservative Israeli analyst, on social media. “It’s as bad as it could possibly be. He’s saying aloud that Iran can have anything it wants because America can’t afford the staring contest.”
Yet it was better to “recognize strategic realities late than never at all,” wrote Danny Citrinowicz of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, on social media.
“Before events spiraled completely out of control, the U.S. administration stepped back from maximalist objectives and returned to a more measured and realistic approach,” added Mr. Citrinowicz, who served as the head of the Iran branch of Israel Defense Intelligence. “The emerging policy reflects an important shift, from attempting to solve every aspect of the Iran problem through force.”
Not everyone in Iran sees the new ceasefire deal as a success, however, and that includes some lawmakers. One group of Islamic Republic hard-liners rejects the idea of engaging in negotiations with the U.S. as illegitimate, and they have been denouncing the Iranian officials leading the talks with Washington.
Other analysts note that this interim deal looks very much like earlier offers presented to Iran by the U.S., raising questions about the necessity of resorting to military force in late February, or last summer, when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran for 12 straight days.
“We shouldn’t criticize the MoU because it contains unreasonable concessions, we should be frustrated that the MoU contains very logical inducements and that the Trump administration was poised to offer,” wrote Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, chief executive of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a London-based economic think tank, in a post on X.
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“In other words, the wars were completely idiotic because the parameters of a viable diplomatic agreement between the U.S. and Iran were already put forward,” with regional input, wrote Mr. Batmanghelidj.
“Iran was inclined to accept the deal, but instead it got attacked.”
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