The MOU
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I have ignored most of the noise since Thursday about whatever it is that Pakistan and I think Qatar facilitated between the US and Iram. Everybody had a version, and Donald Trump’s story changed by the hour. People were screaming at each other on Bluesky over what they thought the official words were.
Well, now the official words are out. They’re not terribly different from the most recent versions circulating, but there was no way to know that. This official version was read by “a senior US official” over a phonecall to journalists, who presumably recorded it and then had voice to print apps write it down, hopefully with human editing. The New York Times has an annotated version (gift link). I have my own words to add, but not time right now to do more than a few quick observations.
First, a memorandum of understanding is probably the minimum agreement two parties might come to, and we know that one of these parties is highly unreliable. In fact, Trump has already threatened Iran this morning, which is prohibited by the MOU.
The provisions are close to the wish list Iran published earlier. It’s a good illustration of why you should go for the maximum in your opening bid in negotiations. You never know when you’ll get it.
The prose is not what one might expect in an official agreement. There’s a sort of high diplomatese that word choice and phrasing don’t quite reach. Some is more like what a bright high school student might imagine such a document to be. We know from the JCPOA that the Iranians are very good at this sort of thing, so I will let you draw your own conclusions. Another problem seems to be poor translation. The most obvious is
During this period, the traffic of vessels will be in proportion to the numbers of prewar traffic being restored by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I don’t know what that means or how to decipher it.
The usual practice for agreements between two countries is to work out two texts in the languages involved. This requires painstaking work by translators and negotiators to get the meanings right. Languages are not drop-in replicas of each other.
There is one paragraph on nuclear issues, which kicks the whole problem down the road for the 60-day further negotiation period. The JCPOA took two years to negotiate.
Trump seems pleased. He said today that that nuclear stuff isn’t so important after all and that he’d blame anything that goes wrong on JD. His press availability was something else.
Update: Noted without comment.