The memorandum that resembles the one it was meant to bury

Posted on: 8 May 2026

Iran is delivering today, through Pakistani mediators, its response to the American proposal for a fourteen-point memorandum of understanding meant to formally close sixty-eight days of war. Financial and diplomatic mainstream reads the news as "deal close at hand", a predictable headline already seen many times. Markets rallied, oil prices fell, the general analytical framing is the classic narrative of negotiating success: military pressure that works, American leadership that delivers the result, an Iranian regime that yields.

The problem is that the document on the table, according to converging reconstructions from Axios, Reuters and PBS, contains a uranium enrichment moratorium of twelve to fifteen years, after which Iran would be allowed to resume enrichment at 3.67 per cent. Transfer of already enriched uranium to a third country, presumably under IAEA supervision. Reinforced inspections with a snap-access clause. Prohibition on operating underground sites. In exchange, the United States would gradually lift sanctions and unfreeze billions in assets.

Anyone familiar with the dossier will recognise these figures immediately. They are essentially the same as those of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement signed in July 2015 in Vienna between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, the product of two decades of negotiations and two intensive years under the Obama administration. The JCPOA capped enrichment at 3.67 per cent for fifteen years, mandated a 97 per cent reduction in uranium stockpiles with the surplus shipped abroad, dismantled two-thirds of operational centrifuges, established an IAEA inspections regime with continuous access to declared sites, and lifted international sanctions in exchange for verified compliance. The JCPOA is precisely the document that Trump demolished in May 2018 by calling it "horrible" and "dangerous", a "giant fiction", an agreement that would have given Iran "a legitimate path" to a nuclear weapon. The American withdrawal in 2018 dismantled the monitoring architecture and as a consequence Iran progressively resumed enrichment well above the permitted limits, eventually to sixty per cent. From there the dossier remained open until the strikes of 28 February 2026.

The honest question worth asking is this: what, of substance, distinguishes the May 2026 memorandum from the July 2015 JCPOA? The plausible answers that withstand scrutiny are three. None of the three carries the weight of thirty-five billion dollars spent and several thousand lives lost.

The first: the memorandum requires the transfer out of Iran of the four hundred pounds of uranium already enriched to sixty per cent. Quite true. But the JCPOA had already imposed a 97 per cent stockpile reduction, achieved in 2016 by shipping twenty-five thousand pounds out of the country. The difference here is quantitative, not qualitative: we are managing a problem that the JCPOA had already solved, and that re-emerged because Trump in 2018 dismantled the system that contained it.

The second: the current proposal explicitly bans operations at underground sites. True, but Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan were already at the centre of the JCPOA inspections regime. The operational difference is marginal, and recent history shows that once JCPOA constraints lapsed, Iran opened additional undeclared sites. Adding a clause on underground facilities after dismantling the architecture that monitored them is contractual theatre, not substantive reinforcement.

The third: the memorandum does not address the missile programme nor support for proxies, exactly like the JCPOA. Indeed, converging reconstructions from Axios and Reuters confirm that the original American demands of March 2026, those famous fifteen points which included ending support for regional proxies, dismantling ballistic missile capabilities and full dismantlement of the nuclear infrastructure, no longer appear in the final document. They have simply been abandoned.

The structural pattern, in my view, is what mechanism design calls "narrative laundering" of failure: when the operational constraint exceeds the strategic posture, the framework declared at the start of the operation gets rewritten retrospectively and sold as progress. The original objectives of 28 February were four, publicly stated by Rubio and the White House: destroy ballistic missile capabilities, dismantle the Iranian navy, sever support for proxies, and ensure Iran would never possess a nuclear weapon. The memorandum on the table leaves the missile programme intact, returns Iran's navy to its pre-war condition, leaves the proxy network untouched, and on the nuclear file obtains what Obama had obtained eleven years earlier through other means.

Andreas Krieg, associate professor at King's College London, puts it academically when he says that "Washington has accepted that the simultaneous resolution of the war, of Hormuz and of the nuclear file in a single final package is not currently feasible". The clinical translation is simpler: Washington won militarily on the ground, entered Iran, killed Khamenei, struck eight thousand targets, and then accepted a negotiated settlement that mirrors the one signed by the political predecessor most despised by the sitting president. The sequence of tactical-victory-followed-by-strategic-capitulation is not new. It is the structure that Sun Tzu called "winning battles and losing wars".

There is a second layer that deserves attention, the one concerning Iran's internal chemistry. The so-called "decapitation paradox" observed by Gustavo de Arístegui in an analysis dated 6 May is something the mainstream is not catching: by having eliminated Iran's moderates during Operation Epic Fury, from Khamenei himself to Ali Larijani, Washington today finds itself negotiating with the most ideological wings of the IRGC, precisely those least disposed to make substantive nuclear concessions. The IRGC's calculation, as it emerges from Tasnim News and Pezeshkian's statements, is that the memorandum will be signed because the alternative is another phase of war that Tehran cannot economically sustain, but on the operational details of uranium transfer the IRGC will maintain constant tactical ambiguity. What Washington signs and what actually happens on the ground will be two different things. They already were in 2015. They will be even more so now, after a war that radicalised the Iranian establishment and killed the only interlocutors capable of structural dialogue.

I could of course be wrong, and if in the next sixty days Iran genuinely transfers the four hundred pounds of sixty per cent enriched uranium under IAEA or American supervision, accepts snap inspections at declared and undeclared sites, and verifiably suspends enrichment above 3.67 per cent, my reading is falsified. If instead, as has happened systematically since 2018, the IAEA flags partial access, transfer delays, interpretive disputes over sites, and we see in the coming months a low-grade diplomatic escalation with Washington seeking reasons not to consider it a formal violation of the memorandum, then the pattern is exactly that of the JCPOA degraded in real time, with a worsening variant: the Iranian political structure now signing is less cohesive, more ideological and less capable of binding its own apparatus.

What financial mainstream is celebrating as stabilisation is in reality the admission that the initial muscular posture was unsustainable against actual constraints. China had ordered its own refineries to defy American sanctions on Iranian oil, invoking for the first time the law on retaliation against unilateral foreign sanctions, and eighty per cent of Iranian oil in 2025 had been absorbed by Beijing. The pressure of the Trump-Xi summit on 14 and 15 May, now imminent, makes maintaining the naval blockade and the maximalist posture structurally impossible. Saudi Arabia has publicly backed Pakistani mediation. Macron called Pezeshkian to reopen the strait. The Hajj pilgrimage on 25 May imposes a diplomatic window that no party wants to break. The global economic constraint has won over the rhetoric of deterrence, with the result that the framework has redesigned itself to fit that constraint rather than impose itself upon it.

There is also a domestic political cost the memorandum tries to obscure but historians will have to assess. Fifty-two senators and one hundred and seventy-seven members of the House had written to Trump on 14 March demanding rejection of any deal allowing Iran to continue uranium enrichment, a position that the current memorandum directly violates. Israel, according to press reconstructions, is concerned about American "last-minute concessions". The signing of the document will need to be accompanied by a domestic narrative explaining why a president who demolished the JCPOA calling it "horrible" is now signing a structurally analogous document after a war that caused 3,468 official Iranian deaths, 2,300 Lebanese, 13 American servicemen killed, 381 wounded. Estimated cost: thirty-five billion dollars at the expense of American taxpayers, not counting the cost borne by all the other countries whose economies have been severely strained by a war that ultimately proves pointless, having delivered no result.

For British readers there is a quieter footnote worth registering. The United Kingdom is one of the original signatories of the JCPOA, part of the E3 alongside France and Germany, and remained committed to the agreement after Trump's 2018 withdrawal, attempting through INSTEX and other mechanisms to preserve a parallel channel that did not depend on Washington. None of this prevented the framework from collapsing. Britain finds itself today watching the same architecture being rebuilt by an American president who had buried it, after a war in which British bases and intelligence cooperation played a meaningful role. The strategic lesson, for those willing to register it, is that British alignment with American positions on Iran has consistently delivered worse outcomes than independent European calibration would have done. Whether London will draw any conclusion from this remains an open question.

The internal narrative, presumably, will be that "this time is different". It is, in only one sense: this time it arrived after the war, not in place of the war. The JCPOA had achieved nearly the same results without Operation Epic Fury, without the closure of Hormuz, without shutting down the route that carries a fifth of the world's oil, without the six thousand total dead, without the IRGC radicalising to the point of making its maritime capabilities in the strait the "real nuclear option", as Jane Darby Menton at the Carnegie Endowment defined it two days ago.

The piece worth writing is the one mainstream will not write, because it requires lining up the facts without worrying about political framing: the war did not change the framework. It reproduced it. It only added thirty-five billion dollars in costs, thousands of dead, and an Iranian counterpart structurally more hostile and less controllable. If this reading is correct, we should see in the next two years a degradation of the memorandum analogous to that of the JCPOA between 2018 and 2021, but accelerated and with less margin for diplomatic recovery. If instead the IRGC delivers the uranium, accepts inspections and respects the 3.67 per cent ceiling, then this analysis is simply wrong. Trump will have obtained through war what Obama could not obtain without it.

I confess a personal concern, of editorial rather than geopolitical nature: if the war truly ends, those who write about these matters will have fewer easy subjects to address. Hot news is a comfortable analytical crutch. Peace, paradoxically, forces the harder work, namely the observation of structural mechanisms when there is no noise of events to provide the narrative hook. I am not sure I genuinely wish for it, as an observer. As a citizen, of course I do.

In two years we shall know. The historical pattern, however, is clear enough that it is worth noting now, before the news cycle buries it under headlines of "deal close at hand" and "regional stabilisation". For now what remains, registrable in cold blood, is that the peace document of May 2026 mirrors the peace document of July 2015, stripped of certain substantive clauses to Iran's benefit. The difference between the two is precisely that measurable in lives, money and residual diplomatic capacity.