The Peace That Was Not One; The US-Iran Memorandum Risks Permanent Crisis
The US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding may ease immediate pressure on energy markets, but by deferring the hardest questions, it risks entrenching crisis rather than ending it.
More than three months after the 28 February opening of the US-Israel war with Iran, the reported US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding does not end the conflict so much as move it into a new phase. It is less a peace agreement than an agreement to negotiate one, with no clarity on the consequences of failure.
If reported versions of the text of the deal are to be believed, it resolves almost none of the nuclear, ballistic missile, proxy network or regional security questions that made direct military confrontation possible in the first place. Instead, nearly every contentious issue has been deferred into a sixty-day negotiating window that can, and likely will, be extended. It creates a politically convenient holding pattern – one that could stretch into the US midterm election cycle, when President Trump’s position on Iran may shift yet again.
If David Fromkin famously described the First World War settlement as ‘a peace to end all peace’, this agreement risks becoming something different: the peace that was not one. The greatest danger is therefore not renewed total war, although that remains possible. It is something more insidious: a state of permanent diplomatic incompletion.
The memorandum rests on four assumptions that will determine whether it becomes a durable settlement or a mechanism for postponing the next major confrontation.
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