Iran is winning the war over what this deal means

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Washington and Tehran agree on one thing: the U.S.–Iran memorandum of understanding is signed. A senior administration official says President Trump and Vice President Vance digitally executed the text on Sunday. A formal ceremony is set for Friday in Geneva, and Trump told reporters at the G7 that the document would be released “probably pretty soon,” but not before the signing.

Yet two days before the ceremony, the agreement remains invisible to the public, to Congress, and to most regional governments. In that vacuum, Washington, Tehran, Jerusalem, and Beirut are not waiting for the text. They are competing to write its meaning in real time — and on the one issue that matters most for regional stability, their versions are already irreconcilable.

Hezbollah has hailed the deal, and Lebanon’s inclusion in it, as a “great achievement,” describing it as a prelude to the full liberation of Lebanese territory and the return of displaced residents to their villages. The group has been explicit that this must not become a repeat of the 2024 ceasefire, under which Israeli forces remained on Lebanese soil.

Israel’s response arrived within hours and left no ambiguity. Defense Minister Israel Katz said the Israel Defense Forces remain in security zones in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza indefinitely, regardless of any agreement with Iran. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir reinforced the point, declaring that Israel will not withdraw from any territory its forces have occupied.

Caught between these positions is the Lebanese state. The Lebanese Armed Forces urged displaced residents Monday not to return to southern villages and to await further instructions — even as some families began heading home, encouraged by news of a deal whose terms the Lebanese Armed Forces itself cannot yet verify.

This is not a rhetorical disagreement awaiting clarification. It is two armed actors and a state security institution operating on three incompatible assumptions about the same undisclosed clause — before the ink is dry, before the ceremony has occurred, and before a single page has been made public.

The memorandum of understanding reportedly establishes a 60-day negotiating period for nuclear and sanctions issues, during which U.S. force posture in the region stays unchanged. Administration officials say troop levels will not be reduced until a final deal is reached — meaning Washington’s tangible commitments are back-loaded against a future benchmark, while Iran’s framing of the deal as a victory, and Hezbollah’s framing of it as a path to full Israeli withdrawal, are front-loaded and already circulating as fact.

The Strait of Hormuz illustrates the same asymmetry. The administration says the strait will be “toll-free for 60 days” and fully reopened by Friday. Iran’s foreign minister has separately floated charging passing vessels a service fee — a claim that, if pursued, would directly contradict the American framing of unconditional reopening. Nobody has reconciled these positions because nobody outside the negotiating rooms has seen the clause that is supposed to govern it.

The normal diplomatic gap is between aspiration and implementation. This is a stranger and more dangerous gap: between a document that is legally executed and one that is functionally invisible. Until Friday, and likely beyond it, every public statement — Hezbollah’s celebration, Katz’s defiance, the Lebanese Armed Forces’s caution, Vance’s morning-show reassurances — is not commentary on the deal. It is an attempt to become the deal, to fix its meaning in the public record before the text can contradict the claim.

That is not a transparency failure. It is a leverage strategy. And so far, Iran and its regional partners are running it more aggressively than Washington.

The signing ceremony in Geneva will produce photographs, not clarity. The actual test of this agreement arrives the first time a displaced Lebanese family returns to a village Israel has designated a security zone, or the first time Hezbollah treats a stalled withdrawal as a violation of an agreement it never read in full. Whoever’s interpretation survives that first contact with events on the ground will have effectively authored the memorandum of understanding

— regardless of what the released text eventually says.

Right now, that authorship is up for grabs. And Iran, Hezbollah and Israel are all writing faster than Washington.

Charbel A. Antoun is a Washington-based journalist and writer specializing in U.S. foreign policy, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa.

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