President Donald Trump may not attend a signing ceremony on Friday in Geneva for the deal aimed at ending the U.S.-Iran war.
“Well, it depends,” the president told reporters on Monday from Évian-les-Bains, France, during the annual Group of 7 summit.
“JD’s coming in for it, he was originally going to do it,” he added of Vice President JD Vance. “I’ll probably be gone by then. We’re having dinner in a day and a half, right? We’re going to be staying quite late. So, I may be involved, I may not, but JD was coming in for that, specifically.”
The president was equally vague about when officials would release the full text of the memorandum of understanding between the warring nations.
“I think pretty soon I would say,” he said, adding that the deal was a “very powerful document.”
The Trump administration has described the agreement as extending the ongoing ceasefire for the next two months, opening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports, while offering Iran phased relief from sanctions based on certain, unspecified benchmarks.
Trump administration officials say the terms of the deal could be released by midway through this week, while the president said in France that text would be shared with the public “sometime after Friday,” around the time of the signing ceremony.
Uncertainty also remains for parties beyond just the U.S. and Iran.
The U.S. kicked off the war in partnership with Israel, but the two allies may be at odds with the terms of the fragile peace.
Pakistani and Iranian negotiators have described the peace deal as pausing conflict on all fronts of the regional war, including between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel, meanwhile, has vowed to continue operating indefinitely in Lebanon and Iran if need be.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I are leading a clear policy that determines that the IDF will remain in the security zones in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, without any time limit, to protect, from there, the border and Israeli communities against jihadist elements,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Monday in a statement.
At a news conference on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu added that his country would take action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons “with an agreement” or “without an agreement.”
Behind the scenes, Israeli leaders consider the agreement “terrible for Israel,” a senior official told Reuters.
“And there is no one in the Israeli leadership who views it otherwise, from the prime minister to the chief of staff,” they said.
The ongoing sense of doubt also extends to the Strait of Hormuz, where oil trade through the vital waterway was all but stopped throughout the conflict.
In France, President Trump said the strait was already effectively open, but will return to normal traffic levels soon after the signing of the peace deal.
“We’ll have all the mines knocked out, for the most part,” Trump said.
The Republican has framed the deal jolting the global oil trade back into operating at full speed, though commercial shippers remain wary about resuming operations through the narrow waterway until more details about the peace process emerge.
Beyond just uncertainty over when ships will pass through once again, there’s the question of who will control the strait — and whether they will charge fees, threatening to make permanent the wartime spike in oil prices.
The Trump administration described its peace package as ensuring the strait will be “permanently toll-free,” while Iran’s foreign ministry said on Monday it will keep charging fees for passage through the waterway.
The biggest questions of all, however, have to do with the fate of Iran’s nuclear program and billions of dollars worth of assets and sanctions that hang in the balance.
The weekend deal provides various unspecified benchmarks that will let Iran get access to its restricted funds, the Trump administration has said.
The fate of the nuclear question, meanwhile, has been punted to future negotiations, though the Americans insist Iran will never be able to pursue a nuclear weapon. Iran has publicly made no such commitment tied to the peace deal, leading to some concern from even President Trump’s most ardent supporters, such as Iran hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham.
“I am somewhat concerned that Iran’s view of the agreement seems different than what the American negotiating team is claiming,” he wrote on X on Sunday.
And beneath all these questions lies a deeper strategic one: what did the Iran war really achieve?
Former president Barack Obama argues whatever deal emerges will likely be little different from the agreement his administration hammered out with Iran a decade ago, which reopened Tehran’s nuclear program to international inspections from the International Atomic Energy Agency and restricted Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and storage levels.
“It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different, or in a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place, and had worked for a long stretch of time before we, the United States, pulled out of it,” he told ABC’s Robin Roberts in a Good Morning America interview set to air on Wednesday.
“So, I’m hopeful that bombing stops and ordinary people are no longer suffering as a consequence of the war,” he added.
