President Donald Trump has declined, for now, to put his signature to the sixty-day memorandum of understanding negotiated between the United States and Iran, leaving the document that would formally pause the three-month-old war suspended one step short of taking effect. After convening advisers in the White House Situation Room — a meeting he had earlier said would produce his "final determination" — Trump emerged without announcing a decision, telling the deal's mediators he wanted a couple of days to think it over.
Rather than let the silence speak, the president set out his conditions in public. In a post on Truth Social he wrote that Iran "must agree" never to possess a nuclear weapon and that the Strait of Hormuz must be "immediately open" to unrestricted shipping traffic. He attached further requirements on the clearing of sea mines laid during the conflict and on the sequencing of the US naval blockade, framing the list as the price of his approval rather than the opening of a fresh negotiation.
The intervention crystallised in plain language what negotiators had spent the week circling. The memorandum, as drafted, would extend the fragile late-April ceasefire by sixty days, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, lift the American blockade on Iranian ports and launch a parallel track of talks on Iran's nuclear programme. The first items on that track would be the disposal of Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium and the future of its enrichment activity, the questions diplomats regard as the hardest in the entire file.
Vice-President JD Vance, who confirmed earlier in the week that negotiators had reached a tentative agreement, has been careful not to get ahead of his principal. Asked whether and when the president would sign, Vance said it was "hard to say exactly when or if the president's going to sign," a formulation that preserved the possibility of approval while conceding that nothing was settled. The hedged language reflects an administration wary of declaring a victory that Trump has not yet ratified.
For Iran, the public airing of American conditions is a double-edged development. Tehran has consistently cast the reopening of Hormuz as a matter of sovereignty rather than a concession, and it has pressed for the right to levy transit fees on vessels using the strait, a demand Washington has rejected as incompatible with the principle of free passage through an international waterway. Trump's insistence on "unrestricted" shipping appears designed to foreclose that claim before the ink is dry.
The nuclear language carries its own ambiguity. A commitment never to build a weapon is one Iran has made before, in various forms, and the memorandum defers rather than resolves the contested questions of how much enriched material Tehran may keep and whether it may continue to enrich at all. By elevating the no-weapon pledge to a headline condition, the president has reframed a negotiating position as a red line, raising the stakes on language that diplomats had hoped to leave deliberately elastic.
The delay lands against a battlefield that has not paused for the diplomacy. Israel has pushed armoured units across the Litani River in southern Lebanon this week and widened evacuation orders, and the memorandum's ambition to declare the war over "on all fronts" sits uneasily against those movements. Mediators from Oman and Qatar have warned both delegations that the practical window for a deal narrows through the first half of June, when military and political calendars on both sides grow less forgiving.
For markets, a war economy and an energy complex have spent the week trading the gap between a finished text and an unsigned one. Crude prices fell sharply across May on the expectation that Hormuz would reopen, and a presidential signature that delivered that outcome would validate the move; a collapse would reverse it just as quickly. For the moment, the most consequential document of the conflict exists in full, its terms public, its fate resting on a decision the president has reserved to himself.