When U.S. President Donald Trump and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Berger Ghalibaf put pen to paper on a 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in June, it was supposed to end the 109-day war between the two countries.
The framework, heavily brokered by Pakistan and Qatar, lifts the U.S. naval blockade against Iran in exchange for Iran to reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz after an economic war that has sent global energy prices soaring and destabilized markets.
Nevertheless, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz remains unstable. Since the memorandum was signed, the number of retaliatory attacks between the United States and Iran has decreased significantly, but it has not completely stopped, with clashes between the two countries occurring on Friday and Saturday.
As the U.S. and Iranian governments reach a 60-day deadline to negotiate a permanent solution to the conflict, important questions are emerging. Is the Memorandum of Understanding a genuine step towards lasting peace, or merely a temporary mechanism to temporarily suspend the conflict?
Analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera see this as a “forced-for-the-agreement” – a ceasefire born out of mutual pain, rather than a move towards confidence-building.
Mutual pain threshold
In conflict resolution theory, parties to a conflict rarely come to the negotiating table in search of peace. They arrive at a time of “mutually damaging impasse,” as in the case of the United States and Iran.
Khalid al-Jaber, director of the Middle East Council for International Affairs, said the three-month war had reshaped the region through open conflict between states, destruction of infrastructure and disruption of global supply chains from Asia to Europe.
During the war (which began on February 28 and officially ended with the signing of a memorandum of understanding on June 17), around 7,200 missiles were launched, nearly 80% of which targeted civilian infrastructure, according to al-Jaber. This reflects Iran’s strategy to finance the war for the United States and the region by directly targeting Arab Gulf cities, he added.
As the war drags on, the United States becomes increasingly susceptible to domestic politics and the global economy, exposing the clear limits of its military power, Nabil Khoury, a former U.S. diplomat, told Al Jazeera.
“This war showed the limits of power, the limits of the use of force. Power does not mean influence,” Cooley said. “You can have the most powerful military in the world, but if you can’t change the policies of smaller, weaker states, that power won’t have any real-world impact.”
State and non-state: Contrasting Lebanon and Gaza
Analysts say there are fundamental structural differences between the current U.S.-Iran deal and the 2025 ceasefire agreement between Gaza and Lebanon.
The October 2025 Gaza ceasefire agreement outlined a gradual withdrawal and prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas, which was supposed to reduce violence in the Palestinian territory. However, in the 260 days since then, Israel has committed 3,465 violations, killing 1,045 Palestinians, injuring 3,380 and detaining 113, according to a report by the Gaza government media office.
The US-brokered November 2024 Lebanese ceasefire agreement has also been repeatedly violated by Israel. Analysts say Israel is using the ceasefire framework to create a security structure that favors its own, and hundreds of Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 4,500 people in Lebanon since it was signed.
Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, said the Gaza-Lebanon ceasefire is inherently incomplete because it involves non-state actors with “fragmented chains of command and multiple competing centers of power.” In contrast, the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran demonstrates “a clear chain of command and the ability to negotiate directly.”
Moreover, both states face devastating economic deterrents. “Resurgence of fighting could once again threaten the Strait of Hormuz, disrupt global energy markets and impose significant costs not only on our country but on the broader international economy,” Mortazavi said. The key difference, she noted, is that both Washington and Iran currently have “more to lose from a breakdown in diplomacy than from the compromises needed to preserve it.”
Negotiations with the “revolution”
The current memorandum of understanding is weak not only because of military tensions in the region but also because of the domestic political situation in both Washington and Tehran.
Abdelkader Faiz, an Al Jazeera journalist and Iranian studies researcher, points out a crucial difference between the current document and past diplomacy. In 2015, former US President Barack Obama negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran’s moderate, Western-educated diplomatic wing, but the US appeared to be seeking direct communication with Iran’s military.
Mortazavi agreed, saying the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was a “reformist and democratic diplomatic project” that was diplomatically sophisticated but domestically vulnerable to Iran and the United States because of both countries’ opposition to the deal.
“This memorandum is a mirror image: a deal between Iranian security hardliners and a Republican White House,” Mortazavi told Al Jazeera.
“So while they are less sophisticated, they are potentially more durable. The paradox is that less liberal agreements may be more sustainable because they are rooted in power centers that can actually force or block them.”
Despite the formal suspension of a ceasefire between Iran and the US, limited attacks and mutual accusations continue in the region, including US attacks on ports in southern Iran and this week’s Iranian targets in Kuwait and Bahrain.
Rather than viewing these skirmishes as an immediate collapse of the framework, analysts suggest they are merely a violent extension of diplomacy.
Mortazavi describes the situation as a “dangerous but familiar stage of post-war negotiations”, with both sides testing the boundaries but careful not to restart the war. This is done by both sides to maximize benefits and minimize concessions in the next stage of the agreement.
“The danger is that this type of coercive negotiation 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 channels of negotiation remain open.”
The future of “pessimism”
After all, the U.S.-Iran memorandum is seen by diplomats as a conflict management framework rather than a final peace treaty. The United States is no longer demanding regime change in Iran, but instead seeks to shift the conflict to diplomatic containment by pivoting to economic incentives.
Assessing the next 60 days of talks, Al-Jaber described the outlook as “pessimistic” – an uneasy mix of pessimism and optimism.
Mortazavi agrees that the most realistic outcome is neither war nor friendship. “This is a rules-based, managed conflict, which is a huge improvement over open conflict,” she said.
Although Iran and the United States are unlikely to return to full-scale war any time soon, the Middle East has entered an era of prolonged managed competition, with conflict perched precariously on the edge of an abyss.
