The Islamabad MOU was barely eight days old when the United States began undermining it. On June 17, Washington and Tehran agreed to permanently terminate military operations “on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” On June 25, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat in Manama and co-signed a joint statement with all six GCC foreign ministers declaring that “lasting regional peace and security requires addressing the full spectrum of Iran’s threats, including its ballistic missiles, drones, and support of proxies in the region.” One day later, the US-Israel-Lebanon Trilateral Framework was announced with considerable fanfare. The three documents, signed within nine days of each other, do not form a coherent diplomatic architecture. They contradict each other. That contradiction is not accidental.
Understanding what Washington has actually been doing since June 17 requires reading these agreements not as a coordinated peace strategy but as a sequential campaign to claw back what the MOU conceded to Iran — without formally ripping it up.
What the MOU Actually Gave Tehran
The June 17 agreement was a more significant Iranian diplomatic achievement than most Western commentary acknowledged. Iran’s missile programme, drone capabilities, and support for regional armed groups were removed from the negotiating agenda. The exclusion is not a deferred item or a gap that later rounds might fill — it is a structural feature of the MOU itself, which “includes no provisions to address Iran’s support for terrorism, or its missile or drone program.”
Those were precisely the issues Washington had declared were its war objectives when it launched strikes on February 28. The US and Israel launched air strikes against Iran, saying they aimed to induce regime change and target its nuclear and ballistic missile programme. None of those objectives appear in the MOU’s text. Iran has since reiterated that some issues, such as its ballistic missile programme, are not for negotiation.
The MOU stipulates the war will end “on all fronts, including in Lebanon” and that Iran and the US will “ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.” Neither Israel nor Hezbollah was involved in the MOU negotiations. That last detail proved enormously consequential. Iran’s inclusion in the Lebanon ceasefire framework and Israel’s exclusion from the talks restored Iranian influence in Beirut at precisely the moment when Lebanon’s new pro-Western leadership had been working to reduce it.
The Three-Document Campaign
Washington’s response to this situation unfolded through three instruments deployed in rapid succession. The first was the Manama joint statement. Rubio co-signed the statement committing the United States to a final Iran deal that addresses “the full spectrum of Iran’s threats, including its ballistic missiles, drones, and support of proxies in the region.” Four days later, the US opened technical talks in Geneva on a nuclear framework that carries no missiles agenda.
The Manama statement and the Geneva talks are now moving in opposite directions, and the states that signed Manama — Saudi Arabia chief among them — hold a written US commitment that the negotiating architecture is not designed to honor. Washington secured a GCC endorsement for demands it has no mechanism to deliver, then presented those demands to Iran as a multilateral requirement.
The second instrument was the Lebanon-Israel Trilateral Framework, signed on June 26. The trilateral agreement signed Friday contradicts the 14-point memorandum of understanding signed with Iran earlier this month. The MOU stipulates the war will end “on all fronts, including in Lebanon” and Iran and the US will “ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.” The Trilateral Framework does the opposite — it conditions Israeli withdrawal on Lebanese state enforcement of Hezbollah disarmament, a threshold Lebanese institutions have never been able to meet, while giving Israel an indefinite rationale to remain in the south.
The US established a direct channel between Israel and Lebanon in April, specifically to detach Iran from developments in Lebanon, only to reconnect Tehran to developments in Beirut by signing onto an MOU that included a ceasefire in Lebanon. The Trilateral Framework is Washington’s attempt to reverse that reconnection — removing Iran from the Lebanese equation and replacing it with Israel as the relevant external party.
The third instrument is the pressure campaign on Oman over the Strait of Hormuz. The Manama statement emphasized the importance of reopening the Strait, noting that free, unconditional, and unrestricted navigation remains essential to regional and global security, and rejected any tolls, fees, or attempts to assert control over the Strait. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned in response that “any attempt to adopt new or separate arrangements compared to what is underway by the Islamic Republic of Iran, will only lead to more complicated situations and delays in the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”
Tehran’s Response and the Structural Trap
Iran condemned the Manama joint statement as “interventionist, irresponsible and provocative,” accusing Washington and its Gulf allies of using diplomacy to reimpose war objectives that the MOU had already set aside. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman stated that “Iran’s national security and dignity are matters that brook no compromise or condition; just as the inherent right to legitimate self-defense is not open to discussion, the means of this defense cannot be subject to bargaining or concession with any party.”
Tehran also urged regional states whose territory was used during the conflict to reconsider their position, saying they had obligations under international law and the principle of good neighbourliness to prevent third parties from using their territory for hostile acts against Iran. That message was directed squarely at Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE — the same governments that had just co-signed the Manama statement with Rubio.
The structural problem is that Washington cannot formally renegotiate the MOU without admitting it signed a document it now considers inadequate. Instead, it is building new commitments around the MOU’s perimeter — through the GCC, through the Lebanon framework, through pressure on Oman — and calling the result a regional consensus that Iran must accommodate.
The withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory, given the security framework defined by Tel Aviv and the fierce domestic opposition to any pullback without full security along its northern borders, appears unlikely if not altogether impossible. This means Lebanon, far from being the endpoint of the war, has become the first and most fragile test of the MoU.
The Domestic Politics Driving the Architecture
The diplomatic maneuvering cannot be separated from the Republican politics surrounding it. The MOU is simultaneously Vance’s most significant foreign policy achievement and his most politically exposed one. Republican donors and constituencies aligned with Israel have campaigned openly for a resumption of strikes. Netanyahu’s government, facing elections by October, has every incentive to keep Lebanon active and prevent any outcome that looks like a forced Israeli withdrawal.
The United States may move beyond the MOU’s framework and introduce new conditions, such as the “complete dismantlement of the nuclear and missile program” or the “full cessation of support for proxy forces” — positions that Tehran would find wholly unacceptable. Whether those conditions are introduced as negotiating demands or as the pretext for a policy reversal will depend on how the next several weeks of technical talks in Geneva develop.
The real threat to the Iran-US MOU lies not in its nuclear and missile provisions or in sanctions, but in the existence of a third actor — one capable of unraveling months of diplomacy with a single surprise operation in the blink of an eye. That actor is Israel, which is neither bound by the MOU nor a party to its enforcement. Netanyahu has declared that Israel will maintain its security zone in southern Lebanon “as long as Hezbollah has not been disarmed” — a condition Israel alone defines and Israel alone evaluates.
The 60-day clock is ticking. What happens in Lebanon in the next few weeks — whether Israel escalates, whether Hezbollah responds, whether Tehran treats Israeli strikes as an MOU violation — may determine whether the agreement survives its own implementation. Washington has built a diplomatic architecture in which that outcome is not entirely in its hands.
Original analysis inspired by Mouin Rabbani from The New Arab. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
