Four months after former US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a full-scale military campaign against Iran with sweeping maximalist goals, a 14-point preliminary memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed June 17 has formally ended the devastating conflict, leaving the core ambitions of the US-Israeli coalition in tatters and marking a defining turning point in Persian Gulf geopolitics.
At the outbreak of hostilities on February 28, the two leaders laid out unambiguous, far-reaching war aims: the total elimination of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, the forced end of Tehran’s support for regional allied groups including Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas, and a complete regime change in Iran. Today, the text of the ceasefire agreement stands in stark contradiction to the bombastic, overconfident rhetoric that launched the war.
Few international analysts predicted the outcome now unfolding, notes Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, professor of global thought and comparative philosophies and co-director of the Centre for AI Futures at SOAS University of London, who authored this analysis. Adib-Moghaddam counts himself among the small group that foresaw this result: as early as 2012, he publicly warned that no military campaign could succeed in curbing Iran’s nuclear program, adding that US officials already knew this fact and had explicitly warned Israel of the same outcome.
In the opening weeks of the conflict, after waves of intense airstrikes targeted more than 900 locations across Iran, both Trump and Netanyahu repeatedly claimed the Islamic Republic’s military infrastructure had been irreparably broken. Trump repeatedly insisted victory was imminent, falsely asserting that Iran had “nothing left in a military sense.” He promised that US forces would “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground” completely, and called on the Iranian public to rise up against their government, framing the conflict as a path to guaranteed regime change. Netanyahu echoed these claims, positioning the war as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to forcibly redraw the Middle East’s geopolitical landscape to suit Israeli and Western interests.
But on-the-ground developments and declassified intelligence quickly exposed these claims as baseless hubris. While Iran sustained heavy structural damage to infrastructure, the country retained its full strategic depth, adapted quickly by dispersing critical military equipment, and launched sustained retaliatory missile and drone strikes across the region against coalition assets. Far from collapsing the Iranian government, the external attack unified the population and strengthened the country’s state institutions, hardening public and elite resistance to foreign coercion.
The terms of the signed MoU make clear that Washington ultimately entered negotiations with Tehran as an equal sovereign power, not a victor dictating surrender terms to a defeated enemy. On three core pillars, the agreement directly reverses the original war aims of the US-Israeli coalition.
First, the framework legally binds the United States to respect Iran’s full territorial integrity and to abstain from any interference in Iran’s internal affairs. For an administration that spent months demanding regime change, this clause serves as a formal legal recognition of the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy and permanence, echoing the 1981 Algiers Accords, in which the US committed to non-intervention and the unfreezing of Iranian assets in exchange for the release of American hostages held after the 1979 revolution. Facing the reality of an intact, fully functional Iranian government, Trump dramatically reversed his rhetoric at the recent G7 summit, claiming “I never cared about regime change” and describing Iran’s negotiation team as “rational, strong, and smart.”
Second, the MoU requires the immediate lifting of the US naval blockade on Iran, the implementation of emergency US Treasury waivers to allow the full resumption of Iranian crude oil exports, the unfreezing of up to $100 billion in Iranian assets that had been restricted under US sanctions, and the creation of a $300 billion international reconstruction fund to support Iran’s post-war economic recovery. This outcome confirms what long-term analysis of Iranian resilience has repeatedly shown: economic blockades and pressure campaigns ultimately fail when paired with Iran’s asymmetrical regional deterrence capabilities. As Adib-Moghaddam argued as early as 2011 on Al Jazeera, sanctions, coercive diplomacy and even full-scale war cannot break Iran: Iranian society is deeply connected globally, and its state and economy are far more agile than Western policymakers have consistently assumed. Tehran’s long-stated threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, also proved a far more potent deterrent than US and Israeli leaders were willing to acknowledge.
Most notably, the MoU is striking for what it omits entirely. There is no requirement for Iran to dismantle its ballistic missile program, and no clause mandating that Iran sever its ties to regional allied groups. The ceasefire also explicitly applies to “all fronts,” requiring an end to hostilities in Lebanon – a major concession that puts Netanyahu in a difficult position, as he has previously vowed to maintain an Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon.
For the global order, this agreement marks a profound structural shift in Middle Eastern politics. By launching a high-intensity military campaign and failing to achieve even one of their core stated goals – neither destroying Iran’s core military capabilities nor toppling its government – the US and Israel have inadvertently demonstrated the clear limits of Western military power in the region. No amount of propaganda from pro-war lobbying groups or opposition factions can alter this on-the-ground reality.
The world is rapidly shifting toward a more distributed non-polar order, one that has moved beyond the post-Cold War Western-dominated system. The US-Iran MoU will stand as a historic marker: a moment when the rhetoric of unchallenged superpower power gave way to the practical necessity of diplomatic negotiation and accommodation with a sovereign, resilient state. Adib-Moghaddam notes that this long-predicted shift is now a concrete reality, and hopes regional and global policymakers will finally learn the lessons of this ill-fated war.
