The nuclear program and ballistic missiles are excluded from the proposed memorandum that is to be approved.

By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by La Razón, 14 June, 2026

What is being sold to the world this weekend as a historic understanding between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran is, examined without sentimentality, an announcement seeking a signature —and an announcement that its own authors describe in mutually incompatible terms. Before analyzing the agreement, it is important to state unequivocally that there is still no agreement to analyze: there is a memorandum of understanding that the Pakistani mediation considers “finalized,” and which Qatari negotiators continue to refine with both parties, which Washington estimates has an 80–85% probability of being signed, and which still awaits the approval of a leader whom no one has seen in public since the early hours of the war that killed his father.

To celebrate this as peace is precisely the “wishful thinking”—the wishful thinking, the illusion mistaken for reality —that has undermined every previous Western approach to Tehran. The negotiators’ objectives are different: the US, to try to consolidate its war goals, and Tehran, to stall and buy time to return to its old ways.

The first and most serious deficiency stems directly from what I have been describing as the paradox of decapitation . The attacks of February 28 did not eliminate the moderates; the tragedy for the repeatedly thwarted agreement is that each of the ultra-radicals who survived lacks the ideological authority, hierarchical rank, and dominant personality necessary to impose their will on their comrades and force them to accept the concessions that any agreement demands. Ali Khamenei, leader of a terrorist and criminal regime, could indeed impose internal discipline; his successors are equals without a primus inter pares. His son, Mojtaba—wounded, invisible, formally elevated to the position but without real command, never tested, surrounded by a tight-knit circle in which General Mohsen Rezaei is the visible link, and all subjected to the fierce scrutiny of the head of the Revolutionary Guard, General Ahmed Vahidi.

The Americans acknowledge that they only believe the “supreme” leader has given his approval, but “cannot be certain.” The Trump administration’s self-congratulatory pronouncements stand in stark contrast to its excuses, claiming that the regime’s internal fractures “are resolving themselves.” That statement should terrify optimists: 
a signature extracted from a headless oligarchy is not binding on anyone , because no single authority can guarantee that the Revolutionary Guard, satellite terrorist organizations, and rival factions will respect it. It is not a theocracy that signs an agreement; it is a jihadist, dictatorial, and mafia-like oligarchy that rents its consent for sixty days.

The second deficiency is that there are, in fact, two agreements—and they contradict each other. The American narrative, defended by Vice President JD Vance against what he himself publicly denounced as “fake news,” is austere: no upfront payments, dismantling of the nuclear program, highly enriched uranium removed from the country and destroyed, an intrusive and verifiable inspection regime, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the US embargo, and economic reintegration offered only after compliance. The Iranian narrative, disseminated by the Tasnim news agency and by Rezaei himself, is the inverted picture: that Trump secretly agreed to release frozen assets —twelve billion dollars now, another twelve billion later—and that enrichment will only be addressed in “later phases.” The Iranians aren’t just claiming to be the victors, both internally and externally; they are deeply convinced of it. A chasm of this magnitude is not a diplomatic bridge; It’s a fuse in a powder keg . Each side has crafted the narrative to portray their victory to their own audience, ensuring that the sixty-day technical negotiations will not begin on common ground, but rather on a collision course.

And this is where the contradiction becomes deeply troubling, because the most significant clause is the one Washington least wants to publicize: that the nuclear issue has been postponed. What the high-ranking official described as “dismantling” and the “removal and destruction” of the material turns out, in the operational text, to be a mere promise to negotiate the program at a later stage—while the deactivation of the existing arsenal is, astonishingly, left in the hands of the Iranians themselves, under nothing more firm than a vague obligation to “cooperate” with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). I ​​want the reader to consider what is being conceded: nearly 1,000 pounds— about 450 kilograms—of uranium enriched above 60%, plus an undisclosed quantity enriched beyond 83.7% —a level dangerously close to the 90% weapons-grade threshold—which will have to be neutralized by the regime itself. Entrusting the deactivation of the henhouse to the fox, and verifying it through an agency that the regime has been obstructing for years with its “managed access” doctrine, is not arms control; it is the whitewashing of a threshold nuclear capability, disguised as disarmament. Herein lies the most dangerous example of playing solitaire.

The third major gap is the silence—three silences, each deliberate. The text says nothing, in binding terms, about Iran’s ballistic missile program : the same launch systems that rained down on the region during the forty-day war, and which constitute Tehran’s deadliest instrument of aggression, will not be dismantled or frozen.

It says nothing about Iran’s sponsorship of its satellite terrorist organizations: there is no obligation to cease funding, arming, and training Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, and the rest of the constellation, each of whose members remains a terrorist answering to a loose chain of command that the new “supreme” leader does not visibly control. And finally, it offers no credible guarantee on the one issue disguised as a concession: the Strait of Hormuz. “Reopening” the strait and lifting a blockade does not amount to a binding and enforceable guarantee of free and safe passage; the memorandum does not prevent Iran from imposing tolls, fees, or “inspection charges” on transiting vessels. Any such toll on an international strait is simply unacceptable, both legally and strategically: the right of transit passage through straits used for international navigation is not something Tehran can ration or monetize, and a text that leaves that door ajar has conceded the principle while pretending to uphold it. Not to mention that, if tolls are imposed, the jihadist regime would fill its meager coffers with between 100 and 200 billion dollars annually. Absurd.

The fourth deficiency lies in sequencing and leverage, and here the regime simply plays better than its adversary. 
The core of any genuine agreement is postponed to the sixty-day technical phase, while the immediate and tangible concession is the lifting of the Strait of Hormuz blockade and the prospect of reintegration. Iran’s terrorist regime thus obtains the only commodity it has sought in every round since 2025: time. Worse still, this sixty-day window functions as a sunset clause by design—the regime negotiates against the clock it precisely prefers—and the much-invoked “enforceability” is asserted rather than implemented: there is no automatic and credible reactivation of sanctions, no pre-agreed trigger, nothing that makes Iranian noncompliance an unavoidable cost rather than a new round of pleas.

A fifth deficiency concerns the region that all this is supposed to pacify. It is touted as a regional peace—encompassing Lebanon, the Gulf states, Iran, and Israel—and yet Israel is not a party to the memorandum, as it has stated . A regional arrangement whose decisive regional actor has not signed, and which rests on the assumption that Jerusalem will refrain from striking in Lebanon, is inherently fragile. And Lebanon exposes the deepest hypocrisy of the design: the text makes a gesture toward Beirut, but provides wholly insufficient support—military, financial, and political—to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), the only national institution capable of disarming Hezbollah and restoring the full and unhindered sovereignty of the Lebanese state over its own territory. Leaving this terrorist arsenal intact is to hold the martyred Lebanese state hostage in perpetuity and to mistake a ceasefire in Lebanon for the liberation of Lebanon.

In the language I have used throughout this entire war, we are not witnessing the end of a conflict, but rather its management—a war of fluctuating intensity, a low-resolution confrontation with immense destruction that no one can win and no one can afford to lose—which is now entering a phase of contained systemic fracture. If an agreement is signed, the most likely outcome will be a stalemate that each capital will dress up as a victory, not a resolution. Let us not confuse the absence of bombs with the achievement of peace.

Let’s conclude with the possible scenarios. (A) Signing followed by credible and verifiable compliance: around 20%. (B) Signing followed by ambiguity and stalemate in the technical phase, with the freeze hanging by a thread: 40%. (C) No signing, or the signing leads to a breakdown and re-escalation: 40%. The arithmetic of these probabilities is already a warning: the most likely path is not peace, but a kind of coma induced by the dangerous drugs of concessions without any counterpart, which the next provocation could certify as dead without any possibility of resuscitation.