A deal is closer than at any point since this war began, but
it is not done. On Friday, Secretary of State
Marco Rubio told reporters there were good signs that an
agreement to end the conflict was insight.
On Thursday, Trump called off a military strike that had been
scheduled for Tuesday at the request of Gulf Arab leaders to
createspace for what the White House described as serious
negotiations. A1 page memorandum of
understanding, 14 points covering the end of the war, the
opening of the Strait of Hormuz and a framework for nuclear
talks was under active review in Tehran.
Iran had not yet formally responded, but two issues
remained unresolved and both of them cut to the very core of
what this war has been about, what happens to Iran's enriched
uranium stockpile and whether Iran can impose tolls on ships
passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Day 85. The ceasefire is still holding.
The deal is within reach, and the gap between within reach and
done is proving very difficult to close.
This is Epic Fury, the US Iran war podcast.
There is a great deal to work through today.
Let us get straight into it. The central diplomatic
development of the past 24 hours is the continued review of the
one page memorandum of understanding that both sides
have been circulating through Pakistan's mediation channel.
The document, described by sources familiar with its
contents as a 14 point framework, would formally
declare an end to the war, set out a timetable for opening the
Strait of Hormuz to international shipping and
establish a 30 day window for more detailed negotiations on
Iran's nuclear program. United States officials speaking
to multiple news outlets describe Friday as a day of
cautious but genuine optimism. The talks, which have been
proceeding through a combination of direct and indirect channels,
produce what 1 senior official characterized as progress on
several fronts. The broad architecture of the
deal, the end of hostilities, the lifting of the American
naval blockade, the unfreezing of billions of dollars in
Iranian assets, the removal of sanctions, appear to be broadly
accepted by both sides in principle.
The argument was now over the details and the details, as is
so often the case, and diplomacy of this complexity.
We're doing the hardest work. Trump himself, speaking to
reporters on Wednesday, said there was a very good chance the
two sides were nearing a deal. He added, as he has done before,
that he had felt that confidence previously, only for nothing to
materialize. But this time, he said, felt
different. He wrote on Truth Social that
assuming Iran agreed to give what had been agreed to, the
operation would be at an end and the blockade would allow the
straight to be open to all, including Iran.
He paired that statement with a threat.
Any failure to reach an acceptable deal would result in
a full, large scale assault on a moment's notice.
The two messages together, Peace within reach, war on standby
with a defining posture of the Trump administration as the 85th
day of this conflict came to a close.
Rubio, speaking at a press briefing on Thursday, was direct
about where the fault lines were.
He said the United States had absolutely no interest in any
arrangement that allowed Iran to control, restrict or profit from
traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
He said no one in the world supported A tolling system on
the Strait. He said any deal that contains
such a provision would be, in his word, unfeasible.
Trump was more blunt, saying the administration had total control
of the waterway and intended to keep it open and free.
He described the Strait as international and made clear
Washington had no intention of endorsing any framework that
suggested otherwise. The context behind that position
required some unpacking. Iranian officials had been
exploring, in discussions with Oman, A framework that would
allow Tehran to impose fees on commercial vessels transiting
the straight. The idea, from Iran's
perspective, carried a certain logic.
The straight passes through Iranian territorial waters on
one side. Tehran's argument was that every
tanker transiting its portion of the waterway was using Iranian
maritime space and that a toll regime will provide a
sustainable income stream to help offset the devastating
economic damage this war has caused.
That damage has been severe. Iran's oil exports have been
choked by the American naval blockade since April.
Sanctions have cut off access to foreign exchange infrastructure.
Strikes in the first weeks of the conflict disrupted
industrial production across multiple provinces.
The Iranian economy is under acute strain, and any deal that
provides Tehran with ongoing revenue from the Strait has a
domestic political logic that is not difficult to understand. the
United States rejected that framing entirely.
The Strait of Hormuz is governed by International Maritime law.
The right of transit passage through international straits is
established in the United Nations Convention on the Law of
the Sea. No country has the right to
charge tolls on international waters, regardless of the
geographical proximity of those waters to its coastline.
For the United States to sign an agreement that legitimized an
Iranian tolling regime would, in Washington's view, set a
precedent that could undermine freedom of navigation across the
globe. The implications for other
contested straits and waterways would be significant.
That impasse, as of Saturday morning, remained open.
The second outstanding issue is the uranium question, and in
some respects it is the more consequential of the two.
At the heart of the argument is a simple but heavily charged
question. Where does Iran's enriched
uranium stockpile go when the war ends?
Iran is believed to hold several 100kg of uranium enriched to 60%
purity, as well as quantities enriched to lower levels.
The United States has insisted throughout the negotiations that
this material must leave Iranian soil.
Earlier in the talks, American officials floated transferring
the stockpile to the United States itself.
Russia, during the first months of the conflict, had offered to
take the material. Trump reportedly rejected that
option, unwilling to allow Moscow a role in one of the
defining outcomes of his foreign policy.
Tehran had at various points indicated it might accept the
transfer principle in theory, though nothing was ever
formalized. In recent days, however, Iranian
officials made clear that removal of the uranium from
Iranian territory was not something they were prepared to
accept without significant concessions.
In return, the supreme leader issued A directive stating the
enriched uranium must not leave the country.
Iranian sources told Reuters that Tehran was prepared to
accept strict international monitoring, snap inspections by
the International Atomic Energy Agency and a moratorium on
further enrichment, but that the physical transfer of existing
stockpiles to a foreign state was a different category of
concession entirely. It touched on Iranian
sovereignty and on the domestic political constraints facing a
government that had already yielded more than a hard line
base was comfortable with. Trump responded by saying the
United States would recover the uranium and would probably
destroy it. He said the goal was
straightforward. No nuclear bomb, no nuclear
weapon, not even close to it. Whether that outcome could be
achieved through enhanced inspections in a moratorium
rather than physical removal of the material remained as of
Saturday, the central unresolved point in the negotiations.
Oil markets moved significantly across the week as the signals
from Washington shifted from imminent escalation to cautious
optimism. Brent crude, which had climbed
above $111.00 a barrel earlier in the week when a new round of
strikes appeared imminent, fell back to close around $103.00 on
Friday. The weekly decline was the
largest in months. Brent fell more than 5%.
United States West TX intermediate fell more than 8%.
Analysts noted that the markets were pricing in the increased
probability of a deal, but that significant uncertainty remained
and that any breakdown in talks could reverse the moves rapidly.
Fadi Bairall, the executive director of the International
Energy Agency, reiterated on Friday his warning that global
oil stocks were depleting and that if the straight remained
effectively closed through the summer travel season, energy
markets could enter what he called the red zone by July.
He said developing nations in Asia and Africa were already
bearing the greatest pain from this crisis.
He said the Straits reopening was not just an American or
Iranian interest, it was a global one and the world was
watching the negotiations with that understanding.
Energy executives warned against premature optimism even in the
event of a deal. A note from the banking group
MUFG warned that full normalization of Middle East oil
supply may not occur until 2027, given the scale of
infrastructure damage, the disruption to shipping insurance
markets, and the time required to recommission tanker routes
that have been dormant for nearly three months.
The economic scarring from this conflict was not going to
disappear the moment an agreement was signed.
On the military side, the ceasefire that Pakistan brokered
on April the 8th and that has been extended multiple times
since continue to hold on Saturday.
There were no confirmed American or Israeli strikes on Iranian
territory overnight. Iran's military did not launch
any ballistic missile or drone attacks against regional
targets. The silence was conspicuous
after nearly three months of near daily fire exchanges, and
diplomats in Islamabad and elsewhere were interpreting it
as evidence that both sides have shared interest in maintaining
conditions under which a deal might still be reached.
The Gulf Arab states have played an important and underreported
role in the current diplomatic moment.
Trump specifically named the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates as the parties who urged him on
Monday to hold off on the planned strikes and open space
for diplomacy. That those 3 governments, all of
which had spent months bearing the consequences of Iranian
missile and drone attacks on their soil, we're now actively
lobbying Washington for a negotiated settlement rather
than continued military pressure, was a meaningful
development. It pointed to fatigue in the
Gulf, with extended disruption to regional commerce, into a
calculation that a deal, even an imperfect 1, was preferable to
an open-ended conflict whose resolution no one could clearly
map. Israel's position remained the
most complicated variable. Netanyahu had publicly signaled
that the military gains of Operation Epic Fury had created
an opportunity to reach an agreement that would protect
Israel's vital interests. But Israeli officials continue
to express skepticism about whether the deal on the table
went far enough on the nuclear question.
Israel had gone to war in part to ensure Iran could never
obtain a nuclear weapon. An agreement that allowed Iran
to retain enriched uranium on its soil, subject to monitoring,
was not the same as the dismantlement of Iran's nuclear
infrastructure that had originally been the stated aim.
How far Netanyahu was ultimately prepared to accept such a
framework remained one of the most consequential unknowns in
the negotiations. The domestic political picture
in Washington had also been shifting.
Republican support for the president handling of the
conflict had remained broadly solid through the months of
fighting, but there were signs of restlessness among members
representing states where the economic impact of sustained
high oil prices was felt most directly.
Democrats continue to argue, with some purchase among
independent voters that the administration had entered the
conflict without a clear definition of what victory meant
and without a sufficient plan for what came after.
Those arguments were gaining slightly more traction as the
conflict entered its fourth month with no definitive end
insight. The humanitarian dimension of
the conflict continued to draw international condemnation.
The death toll inside Iran over the course of the war had
exceeded 1500. In Lebanon, where Hezbollah had
been engaged in its own sustained exchange of fire with
Israel, more than 1000 people had died.
Millions have been displaced from their homes across both
countries. United Nations Secretary General
Antonio Guterres called on all parties to facilitate unimpeded
access for humanitarian workers and to allow the delivery of
essential supplies to civilian populations caught in the areas
of conflict. Pakistan's role as the mediating
power had been largely thankless.
Frequently disrupted and quietly essential, Islamabad had
absorbed multiple rounds of negotiation that collapsed
without result. It had maintained the
communication channel between Washington and Tehran even when
both sides publicly denied that any such channel existed.
Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif and Army Chief General Asim
Munir had invested enormous political capital in positioning
Pakistan as the indispensable intermediary.
That investment was approaching a moment of genuine reckoning.
If a deal was reached, it would represent a defining diplomatic
achievement for Islamabad. If the talks fell apart and
fighting began again, some share the consequences Would be
Pakistan's to carry. The question being asked in
every capital on Saturday morning was the same one.
Would Tehran say yes? Iran's formal response to the 14
point memorandum have been expected Within 48 hours of its
transmission. That window had passed without a
definitive answer. American officials told
reporters they were still waiting.
They said they were not alarmed by the delay.
Decisions of this magnitude made by a government that had
suffered the destruction of its military infrastructure and the
deaths of senior officials across three months of war did
not happen on a timetable set in Washington.
What was known was this. Iran's supreme leader Mojtaba
Khamenei, who had come to power and circumstances no one
anticipated and whose legitimacy at home rested in part are not
appearing to capitulate under foreign military pressure, was
weighing a set of concessions that would have been considered
politically inconceivable just 12 months ago.
The question was whether the terms on offer were ones he
could accept and still govern. There was another dimension to
the negotiations that had received less attention but was
integral to understanding why a deal remained elusive even at
this late stage. That was the question of what
Iran's leadership was actually capable of agreeing to much.
Taba Khamenei had now been in office for nearly three months.
He had not been the first choice of many within the Assembly of
Experts. His appointment had been
controversial, rushed through under battlefield conditions,
with a country under bombardment and much of the senior
leadership dead or in hiding. His base of support within the
Islamic Republic's power structure rested primarily on
the hardliners within the IRGC and among the most conservative
elements of the clerical establishment.
Those constituencies had not gone to war to end up signing an
agreement that involves surrendering enriched uranium to
a foreign power. That political reality was not
an abstraction. It was the concrete constraint
within which Common A was operating.
Every concession he made carried a domestic cost.
The Americans understood this, or at least the more experienced
diplomats in the room did. The question was whether the
domestic cost of the concessions on offer have been reduced
enough by the military and economic pressure of the
preceding months to fall within a range that Common A could
manage politically and still remain in power.
If it had, a deal was possible. If it had not, no amount of
American optimism will produce 1 Western analysts who had studied
Iranian elite politics for decades cautioned against
assuming that the Supreme Leader had unlimited freedom of action
simply because he had agreed to negotiate.
The system of governance in the Islamic Republic was not a
unitary hierarchy in which the supreme leader decided
everything and everyone else complied.
It was a system of competing power centers, the IRGC, the
clergy, the presidency, the economic elite whose interest
had to be balanced. An agreement that the IRGC
believed was a capitulation would face resistance regardless
of what Khamenei put his name to.
That was part of why the uranium question was so difficult.
The IRGC had been the custodian of Iran's nuclear program for
years. The decision to hand that
program's most tangible asset, the enriched material itself, to
a foreign power was not a decision that Khamenei could
make without the Irgc's acceptance.
Whether that acceptance had been secured, or whether it could be
secured was something that outside observers could not know
with confidence. What was visible from the
outside was a negotiation that had travelled further than many
had thought possible. In February, Iran had accepted a
ceasefire. It had engaged in direct talks.
It had allowed the concept of a moratorium on enrichment to be
placed on the table. Months ago, any one of those
steps would have been described as a red line.
The war had moved those lines. The question is day 85 ended was
whether the remaining red lines could be moved far enough to
produce an agreement, or whether the negotiation with Stall and
the military option would once again become the answer.
Trump had told the military to stand ready to strike on a
moment's notice if an acceptable deal was not reached.
Those were not words he had walked back.
They sat alongside every optimistic briefing from Rubio,
every cautiously worded progress report from Islamabad, like a
sentence that had not yet been finished.
The world was learning to hold 2 possibilities at once, that this
ended in a deal and that it did not.
The broader international reaction to the weeks diplomatic
developments was mixed. China's Foreign Minister Wang He
called on both sides to reach an agreement and urged the
immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, emphasizing
that the waterway was critical to the Chinese economy and to
global trade flows. Beijing had been consistent in
its public calls for a negotiated settlement throughout
the conflict, even as its private communications with
Tehran had been the subject of ongoing speculation in
intelligence circles. Russia maintained its position
of formal opposition to the American military campaign,
while quietly acknowledging through back channels that
negotiated into the conflict would serve Moscow's interests.
European governments, led by France and Germany, continue to
push for a diplomatic outcome and expressed cautious support
for the mediation framework being advanced through Pakistan.
the United Kingdom maintained its position of publicly backing
American policy while privately urging a faster path to
negotiations. Prime Minister Keir Starmer had
said consistently that Iran could end this by accepting
terms and that Britain would support any credible diplomatic
process that brought the conflict to a close.
That position had not changed. What had changed was the sense
in London, as in most Western capitals, that the end of this
conflict was now within the realm of the near future, rather
than the indefinite horizon it had seemed to occupy from much
of March and April. The mood in financial markets on
Friday reflected that shift. Global equities recovered some
of the losses sustained earlier in the week.
Gold, which had risen sharply when the prospect of renewed
American strikes loomed largest earlier in the week, edged back
from recent highs. Shipping insurance premiums for
vessels in the Gulf region ticked slightly lower, though
they remained at historically elevated levels.
The markets were not declaring victory.
They were tentatively pricing in the possibility that the end was
closer than it had been. If this podcast is helping you
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Day 85 ends with a straight still closed, the uranium still
in Iran, the ceasefire still holding and a deal still within
reach but not yet signed. Somewhere in the space between
those facts lies the answer to whether three months of war ends
with an agreement or with a new escalation.
The response is expected. The world is watching.
We will be back with the latest the moment it comes.
This is Epic Fury, the US Iran war podcast.