More than 100 days after the United States and Israel launched military strikes against Iran, a landmark preliminary agreement has officially ended active hostilities—even as both sides have rushed to frame the deal as a win for their own populations, a clear signal that each side was eager to exit a costly prolonged conflict. What comes next, however, will test the political resilience of both governments, as the hardest-fought negotiations over core contentious issues have only just begun. While domestic critics on both sides of the conflict have already raised alarms that too many key concessions were made to the opposing side, neither administration has yet succeeded in fully convincing their base of the deal’s benefits.
For Iran, the ceasefire memorandum delivers far more than just an end to bombing: it provides the ruling regime a platform to argue it survived a full-scale foreign military campaign without surrender, and has emerged from the conflict with its standing strengthened. From the opening days of the war, Tehran’s core strategic goal was never to defeat the US and Israel through conventional military means. Instead, the regime prioritized preserving the Islamic Republic’s institutional structure, keeping its leadership intact, and avoiding a total collapse of its international negotiating position. The signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), negotiated and signed separately by US President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, allows Iran to declare it has achieved all these core goals.
Under the terms of the deal, an immediate full ceasefire will take effect across all active fronts, including Lebanon, with both sides formally committing to mutual respect for territorial sovereignty. The strategic Strait of Hormuz, a critical global chokepoint for oil shipments that was closed for months during the conflict, will be immediately reopened, and the US will end its naval blockade of Iranian commercial shipping. The agreement also sets a 60-day timeline for formal negotiations to resolve long-standing disputes over Iran’s nuclear program.
Iran’s immediate obligations under the MoU are substantial, but remain relatively narrow in scope. Tehran has agreed to once again guarantee safe passage for all commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz—a long-standing status quo that held before the outbreak of war—reaffirm its long-stated pledge not to pursue nuclear weapons, and enter good-faith talks on the future of its highly enriched uranium stockpiles and domestic enrichment infrastructure.
By comparison, the commitments outlined for the US are far broader. Washington has agreed to immediately begin lifting its naval blockade, issue new waivers to restart Iranian oil exports, unfreeze billions of dollars in restricted Iranian assets, work toward rolling back long-standing economic sanctions, and coordinate with regional and international partners to launch a $300 billion (£224bn) economic reconstruction and development plan for Iran. This package of concessions explains why criticism of the deal from Iranian hardliners has remained muted in the immediate aftermath of its signing. The MoU gives Iran’s leadership ample political ammunition to frame the agreement as a clear victory: it secures formal international recognition of Iran’s sovereignty, promises an end to the crippling naval blockade, delivers tangible sanctions relief, and explicitly codifies major international reconstruction funding for the war-battered country.
Yet this period of domestic calm is unlikely to last. Even Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s initial response to the deal was carefully calibrated to maintain distance: he authorized the agreement to move forward, but explicitly placed full responsibility for its outcome on Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. All of the most divisive, high-stakes issues have been deferred to the upcoming 60-day negotiation window, rather than resolved in the preliminary ceasefire. The future of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpiles, the total size of its domestic enrichment industry, and the reconstruction of nuclear facilities damaged in US and Israeli airstrikes will all be negotiated under intense international and domestic pressure.
This creates a major political dilemma for Iran’s ruling establishment. For months, state media, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, parliament, and hardline political factions have repeatedly told Iran’s conservative base that the regime defeated the US and Israel on the battlefield. Public expectations of tangible gains have been raised dramatically. Any compromise on enriched uranium stockpiles or nuclear infrastructure could be quickly framed by critics as an unnecessary concession made after the regime already declared victory. At the same time, refusing to compromise carries equally severe risks: if Tehran refuses to make meaningful concessions on core nuclear issues, the entire negotiation process could collapse, putting the ceasefire itself in jeopardy. This would only reinforce arguments in Washington and Jerusalem that Iran used the MoU simply to buy time to rebuild its military and nuclear programs, pushing both sides back toward open conflict.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker and head of the country’s negotiation team, has attempted to frame the upcoming talks in defiant nationalist terms to shore up domestic support. “I am not a diplomat,” Ghalibaf stated in an address on state television, “but I know well how to make America understand.” Khamenei’s carefully worded conditional approval has only made Ghalibaf’s task more difficult. The Supreme Leader noted that he held “another view in principle” on the deal, but authorized it after Pezeshkian, in his role as head of the Supreme National Security Council, accepted full responsibility for protecting Iran’s national rights and the interests of its regional allies. This phrasing lets Khamenei stay close enough to the deal to allow it to proceed, but distant enough to avoid taking public blame if the process collapses. For Iran’s negotiating team, this limits their room for compromise: they must satisfy US demands without appearing to cross red lines that the Supreme Leader himself has refused to fully endorse. Ghalibaf’s tough rhetoric is as much aimed at Iran’s skeptical domestic hardline base, which has long distrusted any compromise with the US, as it is intended for US negotiators.
Comparisons to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the previous landmark Iranian nuclear agreement, are impossible to avoid. In Washington, many critics argue the MoU is a weaker agreement than the JCPOA, claiming Trump accepted a framework that grants Iran immediate sanctions relief and economic benefits while simply kicking the most difficult nuclear questions down the road. In Tehran, by contrast, the political risk follows a different script: hardliners are already preparing to accuse the current government and negotiation team of repeating the “betrayal” they attribute to the 2015 deal, when former President Hassan Rouhani faced fierce attacks from MPs, conservative media, and political rivals who claimed he made excessive concessions on Iran’s nuclear program. For Pezeshkian and Ghalibaf, the urgent task is to turn this preliminary ceasefire framework into a concrete political success before that domestic backlash gains traction.
In the short term, Iran has gained critical breathing room: it has ended immediate military pressure, secured the promise of major economic concessions, and avoided the outcome Washington most publicly demanded: total regime surrender. But a final, binding agreement remains unsecure. The MoU strengthens Iran’s negotiating position in the short term, as the regime survived the war and Washington has made tangible, visible commitments. The core risk for Tehran is that the 60-day negotiation window will expose the growing gap between the narrative of victory sold to the Iranian public and the compromises required to prevent war from resuming. Iran exited the first phase of the conflict far stronger than many international observers predicted, but its next challenge is far harder: retaining the support of its own domestic political base long enough to reach a final deal, without letting necessary compromises be framed as unacceptable concessions or outright defeat.
From the White House perspective, President Trump has hailed the agreement as a “major win” for the United States that will ultimately achieve his core war goal of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. For Trump, an even more immediate political victory is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which is expected to ease global oil prices and relieve pressure on US households. As the conflict dragged on and the Strait remained closed, public opinion polls consistently showed growing American frustration with sky-high gasoline prices and the economic pain the war was inflicting on household budgets. Economic dissatisfaction was a core driving force that returned Trump to the White House in the 2024 election, and the perception that the war he initiated was hurting American pocketbooks had become a major political liability.
While Trump is not on the ballot in the upcoming November midterm elections, growing public unease came at a critical moment for his fellow Republican candidates, many of whom have faced increasingly angry constituents and voters who have voiced strong opposition to being dragged into another prolonged, open-ended foreign conflict. For Trump, the deal delivers much-needed political breathing room, and his allies hope it will let him frame himself as a leader who ended the conflict relatively quickly, avoiding the sort of endless “forever war” entanglements he campaigned against.
Even so, critics of the agreement—including a number of prominent figures within the Republican Party—have already accused Trump of making excessive concessions to Iran. The core point of contention is the $300 billion reconstruction fund earmarked for Iran. “There is no 300 billion dollar payment to Iran by the US. That’s fake news,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform. “All there is for the US is success, lower oil prices, and victory.” While Trump and other administration officials have clarified that none of this funding will come directly from US government coffers, the proposal still has made many within the Republican Party deeply uneasy.
“History teaches us that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a normally reliable Trump ally, told The Hill. “I think the president is receiving some very poor advice.” Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who remains an influential voice among Trump’s MAGA base despite recent criticism of the administration, offered an even blunter assessment. “This is a pretty humiliating loss for the United States,” Carlson stated on his X show. “This is a loss.”
Most notably, the administration has been forced to acknowledge that several of its original core war aims have been sidelined and are not even mentioned in the text of the MoU. Early in the conflict, for example, Trump vowed that the US military would “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground”, leaving it “obliterated”. Similarly, the MoU makes no mention of Iran’s ties to regional proxy armed groups, despite Trump’s March promise that the US would work to ensure “the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund and direct armies outside of their borders”. The administration has now walked back from this original goal, with Vice President JD Vance telling reporters that the US “expects” that Hezbollah will refrain from launching attacks on Israel. Ceasefires, Vance added, are a “little messy” and “flare-ups” can be expected. This omission alone is already guaranteed to make the deal unpopular among the large faction of the Republican Party that views unwavering commitment to Israel’s security as a non-negotiable core of US foreign policy.
