"Where we're going, we don't need deals"
Trump announced tonight that the deal with Iran will be signed tomorrow. Not “soon,” not “in the coming days” but tomorrow. June 14. His 80th birthday. He wrote on Truth Social that the Hormuz Strait will be “open to all” immediately after the signing, and that Iran “no longer wants a nuclear weapon, nor will they have one.”
Thirty minutes later, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said the signing would not happen tomorrow. They said it… well, could happen “in the coming days.”
If you watched my latest video, you know where this is going.
The pattern I described then: Trump announcing a deal, the market pricing it in, and the terms getting disputed in public before anyone signs anything, ran again this week, in fast-forward, and now with a date stamp. The S&P added over a trillion dollars in market value on Wednesday’s announcement. Oil collapsed below $87. All of that happened before a single signature.
Now, I want to be fair here, because there are two ways to read what’s happening. The first is that Trump is genuinely close to something real, and the public contradictions between Washington and Tehran are what negotiations look like when they’re happening across a dozen countries and two governments that don’t trust each other. Pakistan’s prime minister said a deal was “closer than ever before” and expected to be finalized within 24 hours. That’s three sovereign governments triangulating toward the same word: tomorrow.
The second reading is that Trump needed this signed before Sunday, because Sunday is his 80th birthday, and a peace deal on your 80th birthday is the kind of thing you mention at every rally for the next six months before any midterm. And also, a very, very Trump thing to do.
I honestly don’t know which one is true. Maybe both. The behavioral read is focused on the gap between what someone says and what they do, and right now the gap between “scheduled to be signed tomorrow” and “we have not yet made a final decision” is the width of an ocean.
But here’s what I do know: The Islamabad Memorandum, named after Pakistan’s capital, not coincidentally, since Pakistan is the country that made the three phone calls that stopped the bombers three hours before they flew, calls for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen, the naval blockade lifted within 30 days, a 60-day ceasefire extension including Lebanon, and Iran committing to never acquiring a nuclear weapon. That last line is what Trump keeps leading with.
Sounds… clean? Sounds like a win, to be honest.
Any actual action on Iran’s nuclear program: the physical hardware, the enriched material, the centrifuges, only happens if a second deal is reached. A separate negotiation. To be held during a 60-day window that starts after the MOU is signed. The 2015 nuclear agreement, which everyone agrees was incomplete, took roughly 18 months to negotiate. So, sixty days is a bit of wishful thinking.
And Iran’s foreign minister said, on the record, that his preferred method for dealing with the enriched uranium is to dilute it inside Iran. Under inspectors, yes. Inside Iran, yes. Which means the material stays in the country while the second negotiation runs its clock.
When Trump says this is a “wall to no nuclear weapon,” he is describing the commitment Iran is making about the outcome. He is not describing what happens to the 440 kilograms of enriched material that produces the weapon. Those are two different sentences, and only one of them is in this MOU.
To be clear: this might still be the best deal available, given everything I described on my video about why you can’t simply bomb the country flat and call it done. The constraints are real. The GCC’s preferences are real. But “best available option under the circumstances” and “the deal Trump described tonight on Truth Social” are not always the same document, and understanding the gap between those two things is exactly why you’re here.
There are two other stories from this week that connect to all of the above in ways nobody is putting together yet, and one of them involves a number that makes Iran’s $300 billion demand look like a rounding error: