American power has a recognizable pattern. When Washington decides a war must end, it produces a detailed plan: phased withdrawals, monitoring mechanisms, economic incentives, a timeline. Then it behaves as though the document itself were the peace. This has played out across the Middle East for decades, with the same confidence in process and the same expectation of results. One side arrives with hope and a memorandum. The other lives with history. That gap has defeated every agreement before this one, and no drafting exercise has ever closed it.
For years, I assessed legal risk in such agreements across the Middle East and Africa—whether a given commitment would hold as parties' interests shifted. That work came to mind this week as Washington celebrated its memorandum of understanding with Iran. The relief is genuine: a 60-day ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, an end to hostilities after a difficult war. Yet old patterns persist. This deal offers only a temporary window to de-escalate nearly 50 years of hostility. It cannot serve as a final resolution.
A Process That Cannot Control the Forces It Engages
Sanctions waivers are being issued, while the most difficult issues are postponed to future negotiations that have yet to start. The key promise—that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb—has been made repeatedly by Tehran over the years. Even the signing process showed instability: the vice-president's initial meeting in Switzerland was canceled at the last moment, and Israel attacked Beirut on a morning when the White House was optimistic about peace. Ultimately, this appears to be a carefully crafted process imposed on forces it cannot influence.
This goes beyond any single administration. It is the reflex of an entire order. The generation that built the postwar system—the United Nations, Bretton Woods, NATO—did so amid the rubble of two world wars. These institutions were not idealistic projects but a shield, improvised by frightened people against a catastrophe they had personally lived through. Their successors inherited the shield but lost sight of its original purpose. As the fear that once motivated its creation faded, the machinery continued operating independently—summits, signed agreements, established rules. Over time, the process itself became more significant than its intended goal.
The recipients of these documents understood this long before the diplomats who authored them. The proposals did not persuade because they mirrored a reality the recipients already experienced—on disputed land, among the dead, with grievances that no timetable could resolve. They were polite to the visiting negotiators, like guests who traveled great distances but brought the wrong tools. While the gap between the written proposals and the ongoing conflict was obvious to any observer, hardly anyone recognized it.
Two men made careers out of saying it aloud. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump both understood that the order had hollowed out, that those running it were going through the motions, no longer believing in it. But noticing the decay is not the same as remembering why the order was built in the first place. Putin chose to wreck it from the outside. This week, Trump holds a deal in one hand and the threat to go “right back to dropping bombs” in the other. Neither man has what the founders had: knowledge of what it costs when there is no order at all, paid for in ruin.
That is the hard lesson buried in this week's agreement, and in every commitment I was asked to weigh for the risk that it would fail. The postwar order was not engineered from clever frameworks. It was built by people who had seen the alternative firsthand and were terrified of it. You cannot manufacture that terror in a conference room, and no memorandum can substitute for it. The next settlement that truly holds—in the Middle East or anywhere else—will probably be built the way the last one was: not from wisdom but from exhaustion, after the disaster the process was meant to prevent has already arrived.
I would like to be wrong about that. Nothing I learned weighing these agreements has ever given me reason to think that I am.
