The 60-Day Test: What Iran’s Agreement with the United States Really Means

On Wednesday, after weeks of talks mediated primarily by Pakistan, the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran signed an initial agreement to end their war. The breakthrough came days after Washington and Tehran electronically signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding to halt hostilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and attempt to resolve, within 60 days, the interlocking questions of Iran’s nuclear program and American sanctions that have long strangled its economy.

In the days since, the reported contents of the agreement have drawn fire from multiple directions simultaneously. In Washington, Iran hawks have read it as a lopsided arrangement, more generous to Tehran than even the 2015 nuclear deal. In Israel, the agreement is seen across the political spectrum as a bad bargain struck by the U.S. while deliberately keeping the Israeli government outside the room and away from the text.

Inside Iran, skepticism about the agreement runs deeper than the rhetoric of the Stability Front, an ultra-hardline faction influential within parts of the state and society, and reflects a broader, pragmatic unease rooted in profound distrust of the U.S.—a feeling sharpened by the trauma of two American-Israeli wars against Iran within a year, both launched while negotiations were underway. Understanding that psychology is essential to assessing whether the current ceasefire holds, and whether this tentative opening can ever mature into a concrete and comprehensive deal.

What did Iran and America agree upon?

The agreement between the U.S. and Iran is designed to end the war and open a diplomatic process that could later produce a more substantial deal. Stopping the hostilities was easier but the diplomatic negotiations to resolve broader issues will likely prove to be harder and involve higher stakes for the future of the relationship between the two countries, matters of war and peace in the Middle East, and the stability of the global economy. 

Iran and the U.S. have agreed to end the war on all fronts—including Lebanon—immediately and permanently, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other. The two countries pledge to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to start a 60-day negotiation, extendable by mutual consent, to reach a final agreement.

Washington has agreed to lift its naval blockade of Iran, and Tehran has agreed to restore commercial transit through the Strait of Hormuz to match the pre-war volumes. The commitments are already turning into reality: Tankers carrying Iranian crude oil have crossed the naval blockade line in the Gulf of Oman in the presence of U.S. warships, and commercial vessels have started transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, though traffic is expected to take weeks to reach pre-war levels.

American and Israeli military strikes on Iran are estimated to have destroyed and damaged more than 120,000 residential and commercial units during the 40-day war. And the war, according to estimates by the Iranian government, has caused the country losses amounting to around $270 billion. Washington has agreed to “undertake with regional partners” the creation of a reconstruction and economic development fund of at least $300 billion for Iran. President Donald Trump has insisted the American Treasury would not contribute to the fund but hopes the Gulf states would finance it, alongside the release of a portion of Iran’s frozen assets.

Sanctions relief for Iran would follow a timetable that Washington and Tehran would need to agree upon and extend to the removal of punitive measures imposed on the country by the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors. For its part, Iran has reaffirmed that it will pursue only civilian nuclear ambitions and has agreed to negotiate the future of enrichment, its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and related questions.

Trump entered this war, along with Israel, vowing to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and hinting at regime change. The U.S. and Israel have long insisted on any agreement limiting Iran’s missile program and constraining its regional partners and proxies. Measured against Trump’s opening war aims, the balance of the initial agreement does tilt toward Tehran.

The agreement does not call for dismantling Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has reportedly shown openness to suspending nuclear enrichment for up to five years, while continuing to assert its rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it signed in 1968 and ratified in 1970, to enrichment for civilian purposes on its own soil. American military strikes in June 2025 reduced several Iranian nuclear facilities to rubble, but Iran still retains roughly 400 kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium.

Trump vowed to remove that nuclear material from the country; Tehran hasn’t acquiesced to that demand but has agreed to talk. Some analysts suggest it means that Iran would recover the material from beneath the rubble and dilute it inside the country.

Washington and Tehran have also agreed to discuss the possibility of removing primary American sanctions on Iran. It would be a step beyond what the 2015 nuclear deal offered Iran, and that too from President Trump, who spent years denouncing President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and attacked him for handing Iran significant economic benefits.

On the question of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has reopened the waterway while signaling its intent to reaffirm its authority there, and the text of the agreement limits the opening to commercial shipping alone, leaving military transit aside, a distinction that may carry weight later. The question of Iran’s missile program and its support for regional proxies has been left out of the agreement.

The single most consequential inclusion in the agreement relates to Lebanon. Iran has formalized the link between the Iranian and Lebanese fronts, pressing Israel, through Washington, to accept that linkage and stop its operations against Hezbollah. In doing so, Tehran casts itself in an elevated strategic position, as a party capable of setting terms. Iranian state television duly presented the agreement as proof that Iran had compelled America to accept its conditions, which helps explain the alarm in Israel and among Washington's hawks.

Yet the initial agreement is also broad to the point of ambiguity, open to rival readings, and engineered so that nearly every decisive question is deferred into the 60-day window. Even the permanent end of the war is contingent, in part, upon a final accord. The drawdown of U.S. forces around Iran’s periphery, the removal of sanctions, and whatever nuclear concessions Tehran eventually accepts will take effect only at later stages. The immediate gains are modest: an exit from this phase of the war, room for diplomacy, a path for Iran to resume oil exports under U.S. waivers, and a gradual return of regional shipping. 

Why Tehran embraced the deal

When the Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2015, it drew fierce resistance within Iran from hardline elites and the security establishment, even as it won parliamentary endorsement and the Supreme Leader’s tacit blessing. This time, the Iranian system has closed ranks. The evidence points to a near-consensus within a decision-making order that has grown more collective and more security-minded since the war stripped it of leaders who dominated the system, particularly former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Even as segments of the Islamic Republic’s hardline base pressed for retaliation after Israel struck Beirut on Sunday, senior Iranian officials moved publicly to back the diplomatic track. The Iranian negotiating team is led by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former commander of the Aerospace Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), speaker of Parliament, and a man with broad credibility within the IRGC.

The first sign of the IRGC backing the agreement came from Yadollah Javani, its deputy for political affairs, who framed diplomacy and the battlefield as two tracks serving a single purpose: securing the rights of the Iranian people. IRGC’s Aerospace Force commander Majid Mousavi, a hardliner of real weight, urged the public to stay aligned with the Supreme Leader. Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, the joint command coordinating Iran’s armed forces, cast the agreement as the enemy’s admission of “defeat and surrender.” Esmail Qaani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, offered his gratitude and personal endorsement to Ghalibaf and the rest of the negotiating team. President Masoud Pezeshkian described the deal as having the Supreme National Security Council’s endorsement.

These interventions had a domestic purpose: to reassure the ideologically committed base, much of it persuaded by the Stability Front that the deal was the work of Ghalibaf’s team alone, and lacked the Supreme Leader’s blessing. Two facts now stand clear. Almost the entire leadership endorses the agreement and the talks ahead. Yet a hardline segment of both society and the broader elite remains opposed.

Even the Iranian officials who support the deal remain skeptical because it was reached in an atmosphere of profound mistrust. In February, Iran was reportedly ready for unprecedented concessions when the U.S. and Israel launched their war. Tehran concluded that American diplomacy can serve as cover for the next attack. Many Iranian decision makers view the apparent rift between the U.S. and Israel less as a strategic divergence than as a practiced good-cop, bad-cop routine built to maximize pressure.

And Tehran faces domestic pressures. Iranian leadership leaned on its hardline base throughout the war, sending them into the streets night after night. At the same time, the broader Iranian public grew more estranged from the state, a gap that widened significantly after the brutal crackdown on the January protests. The hardline base of the Islamic Republic is pressing for continued military resistance; the broader Iranian public is weary of war and wants the conflict to be over.

Pressure from Iranian society and distrust of Washington drive Iran’s approach and illuminate what the Islamic Republic actually seeks. Tehran’s refusal to dismantle nuclear facilities or export its nuclear material rests on a strategic calculation: stripped of the nuclear program, Iran fears America and Israel would feel freer to strike again. 

Iran’s nuclear threshold ambiguity was supposed to serve as deterrence, but it failed to prevent American and Israeli attacks. Yet it preserved leverage to end the war and demand sanctions relief. Dismantling nuclear facilities and exporting nuclear material would be irreversible, while the sanctions relief Washington offers can be undone, since sanctions can always be imposed again.

This scenario has led some Iranian strategists to put forth the concept of “reversible zero enrichment”: a long suspension that keeps research, infrastructure, and the capacity to quickly resume enrichment intact, serving as a standing signal that any American violation could return Iran to enrichment, even to weapons-grade levels. Advocates of actual weaponization do exist in Iran, but for now the nuclear program serves as leverage and as insurance that the other side keeps its word.

The same logic runs through the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has agreed to toll-free passage for 60 days while planning, with Oman, a new transit regime thereafter. The point is control rather than revenue. Tehran wants arrangements that avoid binding it to a permanent and full reopening, preserving its ability to restrict passage again should the deal fray. 

Lebanon answers the same instinct. A free Israeli hand against Hezbollah would leave Israel stronger and bolder toward Iran itself. During the war, Hezbollah’s pressure on Israeli air defenses helped Iran strike Israeli targets more effectively in the later rounds. Beyond ideology, then, a short-term strategic logic shaped by the prospect of renewed war underpins Tehran’s insistence on keeping Lebanon inside the frame.

Overall, Iran approaches the agreement as though it may never survive the 60-day window for a final deal. Some reports describe a strategy devised by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council in which every American obligation is to be matched by an Iranian step, each taken only after Washington has verifiably met its own commitments. The regional record of the past three years feeds the caution. The Gaza agreement stalled at the ceasefire stage while Israeli operations continued; the Lebanon cease-fire ran largely one-sided, with Israel striking Hezbollah commanders as Hezbollah held its fire, until it collapsed.

What finally tipped Tehran toward signing the agreement was necessity: a condition Iranian officials describe as “no war, no peace,” with war damage estimated at around $270 billion and the American naval blockade pushing inflation above 80%. Even a temporary settlement that stabilizes the economy, eases some sanctions, and buys time to rebuild military strength is counted as worthwhile. Iran thus carries two imperatives at once—relief now, deterrence later—and the agreement’s very breadth is the seam where it tries to hold them together.

Three issues that could unravel the deal 

Sixty days is enough time to test the deal, but not to settle it. Three issues could each sink it. The first is Lebanon. Iran has set the bar high, and keeps raising it, by tying any final accord to a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, framed in the text of the agreement as respecting Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has signaled that he did not feel bound by the agreement between Washington and Tehran and had no intention of withdrawing his forces from Lebanon. Coupled with Tehran’s standing threat to answer any strike on Beirut, this leaves Iran on a knife’s edge: act on the threat and risk reigniting the war and collapsing even the interim deal, or hold back and watch its credibility erode alongside Hezbollah’s strength. This is the wildest card in play.

The second is the question of the nuclear program and the removal of sanctions against Iran, which is the most technically demanding terrain. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal was a long and granular instrument that spelled out, in detail, the limits on Iran’s nuclear program. The current agreement only gestures at the same questions—enrichment, the fate of the highly enriched stockpile—and leaves the substance for later, which is precisely where deals of this kind tend to come apart.

The devil lives in the details still to be written: how long any enrichment halt would run; whether the 400 kilograms of enriched uranium is shipped out of the country or merely blended down where it sits; what inspection and verification would look like across sites that were bombed and partially destroyed; and how sanctions relief is sequenced against each nuclear step.

Layered on top is a complication in Washington. Trump has signaled he will send any final agreement to Congress, and because lifting primary American sanctions will likely require congressional approval, the legislative process could become an obstacle in its own right, or even a deal-breaker.

The third question that could tear apart the deal is the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran’s demand that its effective control over the waterway be formally recognized—even without transit tolls—creates conditions for future incidents. Vessels that fail to report to the newly established Persian Gulf Strait Authority, for instance, could face interdiction, and any interdiction could escalate fast. The stakes, then, stay high.