The United States and Iran moved closer on Friday to signing a memorandum of understanding meant to halt their months-long war, even as the two governments offered sharply different accounts of what the document actually commits each side to do. President Trump said a deal was effectively done. Tehran insisted nothing was final until its leadership formally signed off.
The Trump administration is preparing a signing ceremony — most likely in Geneva, possibly as early as this weekend — for an accord brokered by Qatar and Pakistan that mediators have begun calling the “Islamabad declaration.” U.S. officials say Vice President JD Vance, not Trump, would attend. They describe a “performance-based” arrangement under which none of Iran’s frozen assets are released until Tehran honors its commitments. According to terms a mediating diplomat described to Axios, the Strait of Hormuz would reopen immediately without tolls, sanctions relief would be tied to compliance, and the memorandum would extend a 60-day ceasefire, including in Lebanon, during which nuclear negotiations would proceed. Trump said Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, had already approved the text, though several sources cautioned there was no confirmation he had signed.
The diplomacy unfolded against continued fighting at sea. Overnight, U.S. Central Command said its forces had downed multiple Iranian “one-way attack drones” aimed at commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz — the second consecutive night of such interceptions. Traffic through the strait, CENTCOM said, continued “unimpeded.”
Iranian officials painted a more cautious — and materially different — picture. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told state media that a deal “has never been closer,” while warning against speculation. He described the text as a “14-point memorandum” and noted, pointedly, that it had taken two months to produce a document running less than two pages. Once signed, he said, the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports would be lifted and frozen assets released, and the agreement would include a plan to compensate for war damage. Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said Iran remained in the “final stages of internal deliberations,” adding: “We must first wait for a final decision to be made internally.”
The widest gap is over substance. U.S. officials say Iran would dismantle its nuclear program and surrender its enriched uranium, with sources citing a 15-to-20-year enrichment freeze. Iranian outlets describe something far narrower. According to the government news-agency account carried by the Iranian site Fararu, the 60-day talks would address only three issues: the continuation of Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear program, the removal of all “unilateral and illegal” U.S. sanctions, and a mechanism to compensate Iran for damages from what it calls an imposed war. Tehran, that account stresses, will defend its “right” to enrichment and keep its enriched material inside the country. On Hormuz, Iranian coverage flatly rejected reports that Iran had agreed to cede control of the waterway or restore pre-war conditions.
The dueling narratives have bred friction even inside Iran, where officials have chided domestic media over their coverage of the talks, and where Fars, an outlet linked to the Revolutionary Guard, quoted a source insisting that “no text of the initial memorandum of understanding with the United States has been approved.” Trump, for his part, publicly lashed out at Iranian state-media descriptions that diverged from the American version. In one surreal moment, state broadcaster IRIB briefly aired a simulated mushroom cloud rising over a city, later blamed on an “editing error.”
Araghchi said the signing might now be completed remotely within days — after which, he said, “it will be announced and that will be it.” Whether two painstakingly worded pages can hold once the harder nuclear negotiations begin remains the central question. Pope Leo, surveying the wreckage of the past year, this week called the war a “painful defeat” of diplomacy.