play Live Sign upShow navigation menuplay Live Click here to searchsearchSign upNews|Donald TrumpThe US-Iran MoU looks at managing the pain rather than ending the warThe fragile state-to-state Iran-US MoU highlights the complex compliance dynamics absent in non-state ceasefires.
xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoA poster for the Lake Lucerne Summit is displayed at the Buergenstock Resort, on the day of US-Iran talks, in Stansstad, Switzerland, June 21, 2026 [Denis Balibouse/Reuters]By Mohammad MansourPublished On 29 Jun 202629 Jun 2026When 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.
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.”
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”.
Furthermore, both states face catastrophic economic deterrents. “Renewed fighting could once again threaten the Strait of Hormuz, disrupt global energy markets, and impose enormous costs not only on themselves but on the wider international economy,” Mortazavi explained. The key difference, she noted, is that both Washington and Tehran now have “more to lose from the collapse of diplomacy than from the compromises required to sustain it”.
The fragility of the current MoU is not just due to regional military tensions, but also the domestic political landscapes in both Washington and Tehran.
Abdelqader Fayez, an Al Jazeera journalist and researcher in Iranian studies, notes a critical difference between the current text and past diplomacy. In 2015, former US President Barack Obama negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran’s moderate, Western-educated diplomatic wing, while the US appears to have sought direct communication with the Iranian military.
Mortazavi agreed, saying the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was a “reformist-Democratic diplomatic project” – diplomatically elegant but domestically fragile for both Iran and the US, due to opposition in both countries to the deal.
“This MoU is the mirror image: it is a bargain between Iran’s hardline security establishment and a Republican White House,” Mortazavi told Al Jazeera.
“That makes it less polished, but potentially more durable. The paradox is that a less liberal agreement may be more sustainable, because it is rooted in the power centres that can actually enforce it or sabotage it.”
Despite the Iran-US ceasefire officially being on hold, limited strikes and mutual accusations in the region persist, including strikes on southern Iranian ports by the US and Iran’s targeting of Kuwait and Bahrain this week.
Rather than viewing these skirmishes as the immediate collapse of the framework, analysts suggest they are merely a violent extension of diplomacy.
Mortazavi describes the situation as a “dangerous but familiar phase of post-war bargaining” where both sides are testing the boundaries, but careful not to restart the war. This is being done by each side to maximise benefits and minimise concessions for the next stage of the deal.
“The risk is that this kind of coercive bargaining can easily spiral,” she warned. “The key test is not whether all violence stops immediately. The key test is whether these incidents remain contained and whether the negotiating channel stays open.”
Ultimately, the US-Iran MoU is viewed by diplomats not as a definitive peace treaty, but as a conflict-management framework. By the US no longer demanding regime change in Iran and instead pivoting towards economic incentives, it is attempting to transition the conflict into diplomatic containment.
Evaluating the upcoming 60 days of talks, al-Jaber describes the outlook as a state of “pessoptimism” – a precarious blend of pessimism and optimism.
Mortazavi agrees that the most realistic outcome is neither war nor friendship. “It’s a managed rivalry with rules, and that’s a significant improvement over open conflict,” she stated.
While a full-scale return to war between Iran and the US is unlikely in the immediate term, the Middle East has entered a protracted era of managed competition, where the conflict is contained precariously at the edge of the abyss.
