WASHINGTON- President Trump said Sunday that the United States and Iran have reached a framework agreement to end the war in the Middle East, a breakthrough in months of negotiations aimed at ending the conflict.
The agreement, described by diplomats as a memorandum of understanding, commits Tehran to giving up the development or acquisition of nuclear weapons in exchange for helping to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and the gradual release of its frozen assets abroad, following the signing of the agreement on Friday in Switzerland.
Trump said he also authorized “the immediate removal of the United States naval blockade” on Iranian imports.
“Ships of the world, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” Trump wrote in a social media post Sunday night. It was the president's 80th birthday.
Full details of the deal have not been disclosed. Many details will continue to be negotiated in the coming days, including how Tehran would give up, destroy or dilute its fissile material, or whether Iran would continue to treat the international strait as its sovereign waters.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said Sunday that mediators plan to hold a series of meetings this week to “lay the groundwork for technical talks and the official signing ceremony.”
“We would like to thank the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran for their commitment to finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict,” Sharif wrote in a post on X.
The Associated Press reported that negotiations on outstanding issues such as Iran's nuclear program would continue for the next 60 days, according to two senior Pakistani officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Vice President JD Vance told Fox News that the White House is “still working out the logistics” of whether he or Trump will attend the signing ceremony.
“What we know is that we have a lot of work to do, but tonight we will have a great victory for the American people,” Vance said. “We're just going to keep working at it, keep lowering energy prices, keep ensuring that that region of the world is less than a basket case, and finally, and most importantly, celebrate that we can say with confidence that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi confirmed the deal on state television but said Iran would not begin implementing it until it was signed on Friday. He said the agreement came after more than 14 hours of talks in Tehran with a representative of Qatar, another mediator.
Iranian state television showed a banner reading: “The United States was forced to sign an agreement to end the war.”
Iran's commitment to refrain from pursuing nuclear weapons would simply repeat a promise Iran has made several times before, including when it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its nuclear deal negotiated with international powers during the Obama administration more than 10 years ago.
Iran has 972 pounds of uranium enriched to 60% purity, a small technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90%, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Under the 2015 international deal with Iran abandoned by the first Trump administration, Iran's uranium enrichment was limited to less than 4%supervised by IAEA inspectors.
The vagueness of the new deal, the demand for new negotiations to flesh out its details and the pace of sanctions relief on Iran are likely to draw criticism of the president, who began his political career in 2015 by attacking President Obama's newly signed nuclear deal as a historically bad deal.
That agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, came after two years of painstaking negotiations that were based on a similar, though more detailed, framework called the JCPOA.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview Sunday morning on CBS' “Face the Nation” that the difference between the JCPOA and the way the Trump administration is handling negotiations is the “threat of military force.”
“The big difference is we did it from a position of strength,” Hegseth said. “That military power will remain as long as necessary.”
And, as in 2015, Israeli leaders from all political sectors remain deeply skeptical of the deal, declaring that they will not be bound by an agreement to which they are not a party.
In a phone interview with the New York Times on Sunday afternoon, Trump called Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, a “very difficult guy.”
“To be honest, you should be very grateful to us for doing this. Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn't be around for two hours,” Trump said.
Since the US-Israeli attacks on Iran that started the war on February 28, 3,468 deaths have been confirmed in Iran. according to independent observers. Additionally, 13 US service members have been killed, and the Israeli war with Hezbollah has killed 2,679 people in Lebanon, as well as 23 Israelis, including eight civilians.
