WASHINGTON – The framework that US and Iranian negotiators have spent the weekend trying to close is built around a single architectural idea, a 60-day suspension of the war that ties every American concession to a measurable Iranian step, according to officials familiar with the draft text now circulating between Washington, Tehran and the regional mediators.
The document, described to reporters this weekend as a memorandum of understanding rather than a final peace agreement, would extend the fragile ceasefire that has held since early April, reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, lift the American maritime blockade on Iranian ports, and open a fresh round of negotiations over uranium enrichment and Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched fissile material. According to early reporting, the draft can be extended by mutual consent or allowed to lapse if Washington concludes that Tehran is not negotiating in good faith.
The American principle running through the text, one US official said, is “relief for performance.” Iran wanted its frozen assets unfrozen on day one and a permanent end to sanctions written into the opening pages. Washington refused. Sanctions relief and access to funds, the official said, will be discussed during the 60-day window but only implemented at the end, and only if Iran has by then taken verifiable steps on its nuclear program. The faster Tehran clears the mines it has laid in the Strait of Hormuz, the faster the United States lifts its blockade on Iranian oil exports.
That sequencing is the part of the document most likely to define whether the deal survives. Iran’s mines, laid across the chokepoint in the weeks after the February strikes that killed senior Iranian officials, have been the most consequential single act of the conflict outside the battlefield. Roughly 240 vessels were waiting on Saturday for Iranian permission to transit the strait, and oil markets have remained on edge for months as cargoes have been stranded in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. According to recent reporting, at least 33 ships passed through with Iranian permission in the 24 hours leading up to Saturday night, a small but pointed signal from Tehran that it is prepared to ease the choke.
President Donald Trump spent Saturday on a conference call with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, the six governments that have been the main mediators of the deal alongside Oman. Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, who has emerged as the central interlocutor between the White House and the Iranian leadership, was in Tehran on Friday and Saturday in a final push to close the differences. Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAE president and one of the most hawkish Gulf leaders on Iran, told Trump he supported the framework, a notable shift for a government that for years argued for maximum pressure rather than engagement.
What Iran would commit to on the nuclear file is, by design, narrower than what Washington wants in the long run. The memorandum, according to people briefed on its contents, includes a written Iranian commitment never to pursue a nuclear weapon and an agreement to negotiate over a suspension of uranium enrichment and the removal of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Tehran has reportedly conveyed verbal assurances through the mediators about the scope of concessions it is prepared to make on enrichment and the disposition of the existing fissile material, though nothing on those questions would be implemented during the 60 days. Those steps belong to a successor agreement that would be negotiated under the cover of the truce.
The American military posture would remain unchanged for the duration of the window. The carrier groups, bomber detachments and missile defense assets that were surged into the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the eastern Mediterranean in recent months would stay where they are. They would withdraw only once a full deal is reached and verifiably implemented, the US official told reporters. That clause is intended to reassure Israel and the Gulf states that diplomacy is not accompanied by a drawdown, and to remind Tehran that the leverage of force has not been put away.
One of the most contested clauses in the draft text concerns the Israel-Hezbollah front. The memorandum would, in effect, declare the war between Israel and Hezbollah over, with a built-in exception that allows Israeli forces to act if the Lebanese group attempts to rearm or to launch new attacks across the border. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised concerns about that provision in his call with Trump on Saturday, an Israeli official told reporters, though the conversation was described as respectful. “Bibi has his domestic considerations, but the president has the interests of the United States and the global economy to think about,” the American official said.
The economic stakes for Iran are immediate and severe. Iran’s economy has been pressed for years by the layered American sanctions regime, and the war has compounded the damage. The country’s currency has collapsed, oil revenues have fallen, and the cost of imports has climbed. American officials believe that the depth of Iran’s economic crisis is the single largest incentive for Tehran to follow through, and they have privately said that the 60-day window may not last its full length if Iran fails to make tangible progress. The window can also be cut short by Washington if it concludes that Iran is using the time to rebuild its damaged nuclear infrastructure or to harden its position before the next phase of talks.
The Trump administration entered the weekend split between two paths, a final diplomatic push or a new wave of strikes against Iranian targets that the president had personally weighed. By Saturday evening, he was leaning toward the diplomatic track, according to people involved in the deliberations, though the public posture out of the White House on Sunday was carefully calibrated. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, traveling in New Delhi, said that significant but not final progress had been made, and Trump posted on his social network that he had told his negotiators not to rush, that both sides needed to take their time and get it right.
The unresolved disputes, according to the people familiar with the talks, concern the precise pace of mine clearance, the order in which sanctions waivers are issued, and the language Iran is willing to accept on inspection and verification of its nuclear program. Iranian state media on Sunday pushed back against parts of the American account, insisting that Tehran will continue to manage access to the strait and rejecting the suggestion that Iran has agreed to surrender control of the waterway. Earlier this month, Iran rejected reports of a 10-year uranium freeze as well, a pattern that has frustrated American negotiators who say the verbal commitments offered through the mediators have not always matched the public messaging out of Tehran.
What the memorandum is not, multiple officials emphasized, is a peace treaty. It is a 60-day suspension of hostilities designed to create the conditions for a longer negotiation, with the option of extension or collapse built in. The structure resembles, in some respects, the interim agreements that preceded the 2015 nuclear accord, though the political environment around it is far more brittle. Trump abandoned that earlier deal in his first term, and the current framework is being assembled in the aftermath of a war that began with American and Israeli strikes on Iranian territory and killed several of the country’s most senior officials, including the supreme leader.
If the framework holds, Iranian crude will return to the global market in volumes that the world has not seen since the early days of the conflict, and the inflationary pressure on energy prices that has weighed on every major economy this year will begin to ease. If it collapses, the Strait of Hormuz becomes again the most dangerous body of water in the world. Both possibilities, the American official said, are still on the table on Sunday morning, and the next several days, not the next several hours, will decide which one Washington and Tehran end up living with.
The mediators, for their part, have privately told the White House that the political space for a deal is real but narrow, that any major Iranian or Israeli provocation in the coming days could close it, and that the most important variable remains the sequencing the document already lays out. European backchannel talks with Iran’s IRGC earlier this month had laid some of the groundwork. The 60-day clock, once it starts, will measure not only the cessation of the fighting but the willingness of two governments that have spent decades treating each other as existential threats to live with the consequences of an interim deal that neither fully trusts.
