What an MoU means in the context of a war is confusing and misleading. Is the war over when it is signed? Or is it a pause until there is a misunderstanding?
Kathy Gannon Substack
As with so much surrounding the Iran war, which the United States and Israel began in February, truth has been elusive and words have lost much of their meaning.
A cease fire agreement does not cease the firing. A peace agreement is not an agreement. Instead it is a Memorandum of Understanding.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and U.S. President Donald Trump have been claiming on social media, of course that there is an agreement on the Iran war and says Sharif “peace has never been this close as it is now.”
What exactly an MoU is in the context of a war is a bit of a mystery. Also an MoU has an inoffensive, business-like sound to it. It’s as if the brutal reality of war, the deaths of innocents, homes destroyed, children killed, is made invisible behind the inoffensive MoU. It is manipulative and it should be more than a little offensive to anyone who values words and reality.
And what does it even mean?
Is the war over when it is signed? Or is it on pause until/if the Memorandum of Understanding is misunderstood? Who decides whether there is a misunderstanding?
Can an MoU be interpreted as a peace agreement? Would breaking an MoU be a declaration of war? If it is, would the U.S. administration this time be required to seek permission to go to war?
The reality is that this MoU, if it is signed, is not a peace agreement. It does not end the Iran war, a war that has killed nearly 4,000 Iranians, destroyed homes, and devastated countless lives. Nothing is over. It is simply a pause in fighting while the warring sides agree to talk about the issues, they have been unable to resolve until now, like the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear enriched material.
If one peels away the layers, this MoU, if it is signed, appears to be little more than a 60-day breathing space for President Donald Trump, who is desperate for an off ramp. This MoU allows him to kick the war down the road until he can recover some political ground at home ahead of the November mid-term elections in the United States?
If the MoU opens the Strait of Hormuz to unfettered traffic and gas prices at the pumps in America (which really is all that matters to most Americans), Trump will be able to tell mid-term voters he was right all along: The pain at the pumps was temporary.
This latest “peace has never been this close” moment is not hopeful—it is manipulative, detached from reality, and dangerously effective at normalizing memorandums as a substitute for real peace.
If this is where we are headed, wars may no longer end at all. They will simply be deferred—one evasive compromise, one sanitized memorandum, one future battlefield at a time—while innocents are killed, families are torn apart, and homes are reduced to rubble beneath the deceptively harmless language of an MoU.