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The 60-day clock started last Wednesday. 

Negotiators in Lucerne beginning Friday morning to start the work of converting into something durable on Iran’s nuclear program. The talks were before they began: Israeli strikes on Lebanon continued overnight, killing at least 18 people, in apparent violation of the MOU’s explicit promise to end military operations on all fronts.

The delay is a preview of the difficult road ahead. At the heart of that difficulty is a structural problem that recurs in arms control negotiations—the arms control paradox—or the idea that arms control is most urgently needed in times of highest strategic uncertainty. When adversaries are opaque about their interests, intentions and/or capabilities, reaching effective agreements is the hardest. And the concessions required to reduce uncertainty enough to get to the negotiating table are often the same concessions needed to make the agreement meaningful once negotiations begin. 

Trump set up the test when he from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also called the Iran Nuclear Deal, in 2018. He called it the worst deal ever, and promised to get a better one. Whether the next 60 days can deliver that depends on what you’re measuring and on whether the administration can escape a trap it has already partly sprung.

Where the MOU Goes Further

On some dimensions, the memorandum of understanding goes further than the JCPOA ever did because its scope is broader. Due to recent military actions, it covers territory the 2015 deal never touched: a post-war ceasefire, the Strait of Hormuz, and $300 billion in reconstruction financing, and full sanctions removal. Critically, it commits to lifting primary sanctions, or prohibitions on U.S. persons and dollar transactions that the JCPOA left untouched. As opposed to the nuclear agreement that was the JCPOA, the MOU speaks to a comprehensive settlement that addresses Iran’s economic integration alongside its weapons potential.

“Potential” is the keyword here. A broad agreement that provides all the MOU promises would be a real achievement. The JCPOA’s fundamental vulnerability, according to the first Trump administration, was always its narrowness: a technically precise nuclear agreement embedded in a hostile political relationship, with no mechanism to address the underlying sources of that hostility, including Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for armed proxies across the region. Critics on the right called these omissions disqualifying from the start; the JCPOA’s architects called them a necessary bracketing of the achievable. Both were partly right. 

In terms of its breadth, the MOU’s ambition is of a different kind. The U.S. negotiating team ballistic missiles, while proxy forces and IRGC foreign operations do not appear in the text. 

The MOU is broader than the JCPOA in some directions, but it is no more complete in others.

Where the MOU Falls Short

The MOU is far less specific on constraints on Iran’s nuclear program. It notes no enrichment ceiling, no cap on centrifuge capacity, no stockpile limit or verification protocol. The JCPOA ran to 159 pages of technical annexes negotiated by nuclear physicists over 23 months. The MOU’s nuclear provisions are a single paragraph.

Iran’s commitment not to “procure or develop nuclear weapons” is the same political declaration it has made for years, including in the JCPOA itself. The 60-day talks are precisely supposed to turn this declaration into an enforceable nonproliferation agreement.

There is also the matter of Iran’s current nuclear posture. In 2015, the JCPOA froze Iran’s program at a specific, verified baseline: a breakout time of roughly 12 months, with a known stockpile and a documented centrifuge inventory. Iran’s enrichment infrastructure was subsequently by the June 2025 strikes. Thus, the MOU’s reference to preserving “the current status quo” leaves undefined exactly what that status quo is. Without an , we don’t know what we’re preserving. That ambiguity matters a great deal if the 60 days produce an agreement and even more if they don’t.

The Problem: Sequencing

The single biggest problem going into the final deal is the order of operations.

The JCPOA was built on a specific logic: economic relief followed IAEA verification. 

Sanctions were lifted in stages, each stage conditioned on confirmed Iranian compliance with nuclear limits. The sequencing was the deal’s primary source of coercive leverage. Iran had to “earn” each tranche of economic relief by demonstrating a measurable nuclear restraint.

The MOU reverses that logic: oil sanction waivers have , and the naval . Meanwhile, Iran is billions in oil revenue during the 60-day window. The $300 billion reconstruction commitment is also looming in the background, and all before enrichment limits, centrifuge caps, or a stockpile disposition timeline exist.

This is the arms control paradox. The actions required to reduce uncertainty sufficient to stop the war—to get Iran to open the Strait, and to bring it to the negotiating table—were paid in the currency that determines what nuclear limits are applied to the negotiation sequence. 

Every concession front-loaded to secure the ceasefire is a concession that can no longer be conditioned on nuclear outcomes. Iran’s incentive to make those concessions diminishes in proportion to the economic relief already flowing. The leverage that was supposed to purchase nuclear limits has, in significant part, already been spent.

This problem was, in a sense, unavoidable. To stop the war, the U.S. needed Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. To get Iran to open the Strait, the U.S. had to demonstrate a credible willingness to engage economically. The price of uncertainty reduction (of getting Iran to the negotiating table at all) was paid in the currency that matters most at the table itself. That is a real dilemma, and naming it clearly is the prerequisite for understanding what the 60-day talks can actually achieve.

What to Watch

• The “current status quo” language. Iran’s enrichment posture today is nothing like it was in 2015. Preserving the status quo means that, absent a verified IAEA baseline, the phrase remains ambiguous. Whether negotiators move immediately to establish a shared understanding of the status quo will signal how seriously both sides intend to operationalize the nuclear provisions.
• Whether economic concessions get resequenced. Oil sanctions waivers have already been issued and the naval blockade lifted, but the $300 billion reconstruction package has not yet been laid out. Whether that financing gets tied to nuclear milestones or disbursed on a timeline independent of nuclear progress is perhaps the most consequential design decision the 60 days will produce.
• Whether enrichment actually gets resolved. The MOU says the parties will “discuss the issue of enrichment.” Iran’s Foreign Minister has that enrichment will continue with or without a deal. It is worth noting that the U.S. demanding zero enrichment. That gap is enormous, and the MOU defers its resolution to the hardest moment.
• Whether Israel’s Lebanon operations derail the process. The talks were delayed on Friday because of overnight strikes that the MOU explicitly promised to end. Iran considers Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon a prerequisite for the war’s full conclusion. The U.S. cannot deliver Israeli compliance, which makes for a credibility gap that will be a persistent liability at the nuclear negotiation table.

What Needs to Happen

To deliver on the promise of a better deal, the administration needs to treat the next 60 days as the negotiation that the MOU has not yet accomplished.

1. First, it must establish a verified IAEA baseline now, before economic concessions continue to flow. The technical foundation for any nuclear agreement is a confirmed picture of Iran’s current program: what exists, where, and in what quantities.
2. Second, it must tie the $300 billion reconstruction package to nuclear milestones. This is the most powerful remaining lever. Disbursing it on a timeline independent of nuclear progress would repeat the sequencing error of the ceasefire phase.
3. Third, negotiators need to specify enrichment limits, centrifuge caps, and a stockpile disposition timeline. These are the technical core of any serious nuclear agreement. A framework that omits them is not a nuclear deal: it is a placeholder.
4. Fourth, the administration must build a compliance mechanism that doesn’t require a unanimous Security Council to function. The JCPOA’s snapback mechanism was its most important structural feature and its most exploited vulnerability. Any successor agreement needs an enforcement architecture that can survive great-power politics.
5. Fifth, the agreement must be multilateralized now. A bilateral deal developed without allied input is fragile in exactly the ways that made the JCPOA vulnerable to withdrawal. European and Gulf partners who have stakes in the outcome should be brought into the architecture, not presented with a finished product.

A Pathway to a Better Deal?

Debatable. The MOU is broader in ambition and shallower in nuclear specifics compared to the JCPOA. Its sequencing has front-loaded economic concessions in ways that constrain what the 60-day talks can achieve. And it has launched a nuclear negotiation before the foundational technical baseline has been established.

But the architecture is not foreclosed. A final agreement that re-sequences remaining economic concessions, specifies nuclear limits, and builds a durable verification regime could justify the MOU’s ambitions. The question is whether the administration uses the next 60 days to negotiate what the memorandum left unresolved, or whether the 60 days produce another framework that defers the hardest questions again.

Iran has already demonstrated that it can impose costs severe enough to force the United States to seek a way out. It comes to Lucerne having shown Trump and the world the power it can wield over the global economy. The next deal will be built in the shadow of that demonstration.