On June 17, leaked drafts of the fourteen point memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran, reported by Bloomberg and obtained separately by CNN and The Times of Israel, finally committed to paper the question that had been kept deliberately blurry for weeks.

The fate of Iran’s enriched uranium stays unresolved, pushed into a sixty day negotiation that can be extended by mutual consent. The text asks Iran to reaffirm, in words, that it will never produce a nuclear weapon, and it leaves the material itself exactly where it has sat since the first bomb fell.

The war was fought over that uranium. The agreement that ends the war does not remove it. The formal signing is set for Friday in Switzerland, and Iran has already dismissed the leaked text as incomplete, which only thickens the fog around the single fact that matters most. The stockpile remains on Iranian soil.

A deal that defers the only thing that mattered

Strip the fourteen points to their core and the bargain reads plainly. There is an immediate and permanent ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon. There is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil and gas once moved. There is sanctions relief, with Treasury waivers issued almost the moment the ink dries, letting Iran sell its crude and petrochemicals again.

There is the release of frozen assets and, according to Reuters, a private investment vehicle of at least three hundred billion dollars, financed by companies rather than by the American treasury, meant to rehabilitate the Iranian economy. And there is a phased withdrawal of United States forces from the region within thirty days of a final accord. In return, Iran offers a single sentence of reassurance about a weapon it claims it never wanted.

The draft language makes the deferral almost explicit. It speaks of resolving Iran’s “nuclear needs” in the final agreement, and it asks Tehran to maintain what it calls the status quo on........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)