CROSSPOST: FRANK FUKUYAMA: The Art of the Non-Deal
Frank’s subhead: With this ceasefire, Trump has capitulated to Iran. Trump is calling his 60‑day ceasefire with Iran a historic deal and boasting that the Strait of Hormuz is now “permanently toll‑free.” But I see something else: a war that achieved none of its stated aims, and a White House paying Iran to undo the damage it caused itself…
As I see it, the most likely path going forward is this:
Trump fails to deliver on his promise to get Netanyahu to stop attacking in Lebanon.
Iran’s response to that is to say that all other negotiations have to be paused until Trump delivers that.
Thus we have a renewed 60-day ceasefire, but one in which Iran gets paid $500 million a day to let ships go through the Strait of Hormuz.
Whether Iran allows the full shipping backlog to go through Hormuz or whether they slow walk it in some way is unclear.
Normal shipments through Hormuz are 20 million barrels of oil per day, which is 1.6 billion per day.
Iran is thus getting a 30% tariff on exports of oil through Hormuz—if they do not slow walk vessel permissions.
And then, in 60 days, we do this again.
Am I wrong?
CROSSPOST: FRANK FUKUYAMA: The Art of the Non-Deal
<https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-art-of-the-non-deal>
JUN 15, 2026
So Donald Trump, on his 80th birthday, announced a deal in which there would be a 60-day ceasefire. Precise details have not yet been officially published. But, according to reports, they apparently include a cessation of attacks in Lebanon, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz—according to Trump, “permanently toll-free”—and lifting the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. He touted this as a key win, in the process praising China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin for helping secure it.
This “deal” was nothing of the sort. If the reports are accurate, it instead represented a total U.S. capitulation to Iran. It basically set the clock back to February, when the Strait was open and the United States and Israel had not yet started bombing the Islamic Republic. It merely solved a problem that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had themselves created by launching the war in the first place.
till left up to future negotiations are all of the objectives that the Trump administration has set forth over the past three months in trying to justify the war:
There was no regime change or “unconditional surrender”; the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remains even more firmly in control of the country than previously;
There was no commitment by Iran to turn over its stockpiles of enriched uranium;
There was no commitment to stop enriching uranium, either immediately or on some specified date in the future;
There were no commitments on ending Iranian support for allied groups like the Houthis or Hezbollah in the region;
There was no agreement by Iran to let up on the violent suppression of protesters.
The reported “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) kicks all of the contentious issues down the road into negotiations that are to take place during the 60-day ceasefire. Trump treated all of these issues as having been conceded already, but if that were the case, why weren’t they in the MOU? It is very unlikely that Iran will budge over the next two months, since it is precisely these issues that speak to the regime’s core identity.
Trump stated that if Iran didn’t agree to these outstanding terms, he would re-commence the war and possibly make the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues. It is hard to know whether such an initiative is more ludicrous from the standpoint of countries in the Middle East, including U.S. friends like Saudi Arabia or the UAE who would now be paying explicitly for U.S. protection, or from domestic opinion in the United States, where everyone would like to be done with the region as soon as possible.
The MOU that Trump celebrated is a worse agreement than Obama’s 2015 deal, which Trump endlessly castigated in the past. Obama’s deal forbade Iran from enriching uranium beyond 3.67 percent for 15 years (far below the 90 percent enrichment necessary for bomb-grade purposes), and provided specific measures for removing enriched uranium from Iran. All of these provisions were to be overseen by outside inspectors, and Iran complied with its terms until Trump withdrew from the agreement. The major criticism of the deal, which U.S. hardliners stressed, was that it said nothing about Iranian support for regional proxies and that it provided sanctions relief at the start of the agreement.
Trump’s reported MOU, meanwhile, places no limits on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and makes no commitments about regional proxies. It does not provide for sanctions if Iran doesn’t concede by the end of the 60 days, though the Iranians have said that they will not proceed with final negotiations unless such relief occurs first. So Trump’s purported deal achieves considerably less than the agreement that Obama made.
