The Signature Not Worth The Ink
Twenty-one days after Donald Trump signed the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding to end the Iran war, his bombers are back over the Persian Gulf, his ships are running a route the deal does not authorize, and his threats to obliterate the water supply of millions have moved from rhetoric to written policy. What remains — for allies who negotiated in good faith and for adversaries who never trusted him — is a simpler question about American power.
On June 17, in Islamabad, Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian put their signatures on a fourteen-point memorandum of understanding intended to end the war that began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28. The document set a sixty-day clock for nuclear negotiations, promised the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, and committed both parties to a ceasefire. Vice President JD Vance, who flew to Switzerland to broker the terms, called it a durable framework. The president called it a triumph. Twenty-one days later, the president is calling it “over.”
This is not a story about a deal that failed under the weight of unforeseeable circumstance. It is a story about a president whose signature, at this point in his second term, no longer functions the way a president’s signature is supposed to function — as a binding representation of the United States government. It is a story about how that failure lands: for the sailors on tankers still transiting a contested waterway, for the eleven million residents of Tehran now hearing threats to their power grid and their water supply, for the allies who spent months at the negotiating table only to watch the terms rewritten in real time, and for the American public that has been asked to pay — in dollars, in depleted arsenals, in emptied strategic reserves, and in whatever remains of national credibility — for one man’s obsession with a country he cannot seem to defeat.
The events of the past seventy-two hours crystallize the pattern. On Monday, Iran struck three commercial vessels in or near the Strait of Hormuz, including the Qatari-flagged liquefied natural gas tanker al-Rakiyat. Early Wednesday, U.S. Central Command launched what Trump described as strikes “twenty times harder” than Iran’s. From Ankara, where he was attending a NATO summit, the president called Iranian authorities “sick” and “scum,” and declared the memorandum of understanding he signed three weeks ago to be finished. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” he told reporters. He added that trying to deal with Iran had been “a waste of time.”
A waste of time. The document ended a war. Or was supposed to.
I. The Deal He Signed, Then Discarded
The dispute at the center of the collapse is not obscure. It concerns Article 5 of the Islamabad MOU, which states that Iran will use its “best efforts” to ensure the safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, free of charge, for a period of sixty days. The clause also opens the door to Iran-Oman consultations over the “future administration and maritime services” of the strait. Every party to the negotiations understood that Iran, as the coastal state on one side of the waterway, would have a role in traffic management. That was not a hidden concession. It was the deal.
Iranian officials — including Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi and Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei — have argued publicly and in writing that Article 5 gives Tehran authority over ship routing. The Trump administration insists it does not. That is a genuine dispute, and the MOU had a mechanism for resolving it: talks, brokered by Qatar and Pakistan, backed by intermediaries in the United Arab Emirates. Vance himself, on the day the strikes began, wrote on X that if the Iranians “have disagreements about how the MOU is being applied, they can pick up the phone.” He wrote that just before dropping ordnance.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”
— Donald J. Trump, Ankara, July 8, 2026
What the administration did not do was pick up the phone. What it did instead was route a growing number of tankers through what the U.S.-led Joint Maritime Information Center calls “a parallel route” passing close to the Omani coast — a corridor the United States insists is authorized under international law of the sea, and which Iran insists violates the very clause the president signed. When Iran fired drones at ships transiting that corridor, most notably the Singapore-flagged M/V Ever Lovely on June 26, the administration treated it as an unprovoked ceasefire violation. Iran treated it as a promised response to Washington’s unilateral rewriting of the deal’s operational meaning.
A senior U.S. official, speaking to CNN this week, called Iran’s strikes a “gross violation” of the memorandum. That may be true. It is also true that when the president of one signatory to an agreement publicly rewrites the terms of that agreement in the weeks after signing it — when he chooses a parallel maritime corridor, backs it with the Fifth Fleet, and dares Iran to test it — the concept of “violation” begins to work in both directions. The Trump administration’s position is that Iran’s interpretation of Article 5 is wrong. That is an argument to be resolved at a table. It is not, in any reading of the document, a license to route commercial shipping unilaterally through waters the other signatory believes it controls.
II. The “Parallel Route” and the Plain Text
The maritime dispute matters because it is the load-bearing wall of the entire deal. If the United States can, three weeks after signing, effectively nullify Article 5 by asserting an interpretation that the other signatory publicly rejects — and then bomb the other signatory when it acts on its interpretation — no future adversary will treat an American MOU as anything more than a delaying tactic. This is the reputational cost that former U.S. Naval War College professor Michael Schmitt, one of the most respected authorities in the international law of armed conflict, has been warning about since March. The word “MOU” is only as strong as the government that signs it.
Below is what the parties actually agreed to, what the administration is doing instead, and what it means.
Iran agreed to use its “best efforts” for the safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, free of charge, for 60 days. The article also provides for Iran-Oman talks on the “future administration” of the waterway. Reporting from The Hill details the fourteen-point structure.
The U.S.-led JMIC has expanded a route near Oman for two-way traffic. Iran’s IRGC calls this an “Omani route” it did not consent to, and has said patrol boats have been deployed to block it. Per CNN reporting, the Qatari al-Rakiyat was struck attempting this passage on July 7.
Iran claims Article 5 grants it authority over “arrangements” for transit; the U.S. insists the clause only obligates Iran to ensure non-obstruction. Both readings exist in the public record. The MOU’s dispute-resolution mechanism was never invoked before the bombing resumed.
The administration signed a document, then reinterpreted its operative provision unilaterally, then used military force to enforce that reinterpretation. To adversaries and allies alike, this is the definition of a signature no future negotiator can rely on.
III. The Openly Promised War Crime
None of this exists in isolation from the president’s stated intent for what comes next. Since March, Donald Trump has publicly and repeatedly threatened to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure — its electric grid, its bridges, its oil facilities, and, most damningly, its desalination plants. On March 30, he wrote on Truth Social that if the strait were not reopened, the United States would “conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!).” On April 7, hours before the deadline that produced the temporary ceasefire, he posted that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Asked whether he was concerned about committing war crimes, he told reporters he was “not at all” concerned.
Desalination plants are not military infrastructure. They are how millions of people drink water. The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which the United States is a party, prohibits collective punishment: penalties inflicted on a civilian population to coerce its government. Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at the rights group DAWN, put it as plainly as international law allows: threatening to obliterate a nation’s power grid, oil infrastructure, and water supply to coerce its government is “textbook collective punishment and a war crime.” Michael Schmitt, the Naval War College emeritus professor, called the threat “clearly a threat of unlawful action.” Margaret Donovan, a former lawyer in the U.S. Army’s JAG Corps, told CNN that the scope of the president’s rhetoric — his promise to destroy all Iranian power plants, not some — changed her view of the legal analysis. Not just problematic, in her assessment. Categorical.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) called it a “textbook war crime.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called it something no president in control of his senses would say. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), one of the president’s most loyal Senate allies, told the Wall Street Journal that Trump “loses me if he attacks civilian targets.” Even Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Tex.) issued a public statement that the destruction of “a whole civilization” is “not who we are.” Trump’s own Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, has fired the top uniformed lawyers of the Army, Navy, and Air Force — telling reporters he did not want them serving as “roadblocks” — and dissolved the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation program. Axios, which first reported the dismantling, noted that Hegseth also declared “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” at a Pentagon briefing — a phrase the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual classifies as a war crime. He has not retracted it.
This is the legal and moral posture the administration brought to the June 17 signing. It is the posture the administration returns to now that the president has declared the agreement finished.
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IV. The Arsenal and the Reserve
There is also the question of what the war has cost, in the most concrete sense the phrase can carry. In May, the Center for Strategic and International Studies released an analysis, first reported by Military Times, finding that the 38-day bombing campaign against Iran — designated Operation Epic Fury, in which more than 12,000 targets were struck — has drawn down the U.S. inventory of Tomahawk cruise missiles, Patriot interceptors, and THAAD interceptors to levels that will require at least three years to restore. The analysis, written by former Pentagon acquisitions official Mark Cancian, concluded that the depleted stockpiles have created what CSIS called “a window of vulnerability for a potential Western Pacific conflict.” China has stated a goal of being militarily capable of taking Taiwan by force by 2027. The Trump administration has, per its own Navy Secretary, paused fourteen billion dollars in congressionally approved arms sales to Taiwan because the missiles are needed for Iran.
“The depleted inventories have created a window of vulnerability for a potential Western Pacific conflict.”
— Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 2026
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve tells the same story from a different angle. Trump, in his first-term rhetoric and throughout his 2024 campaign, savaged Joe Biden for drawing down the SPR to combat gasoline prices. That drawdown, at approximately 180 million barrels, remains the largest single release in the reserve’s fifty-year history. The Trump administration’s own drawdown, undertaken to blunt the price shock of the Iran war, has now brought the SPR to roughly 340 million barrels — the lowest level since 1983. At the G7 last month, the president himself conceded that U.S. oil reserves “could have run out in four weeks” had the strait not been opened. He offered that as evidence the MOU was necessary. It is also, of course, evidence of exactly how thin the margin has become — and how much less margin remains for the war he has just chosen to resume.
There is a coherent way to spend three years of Tomahawk production and the strategic reserve on a single foreign objective. It is not clear that the coherent way describes what has actually happened. What has happened is that a president who campaigned on “no new wars,” who has spent months insisting Iran is “negotiating on fumes,” has burned through the most expensive and slowly replenished layers of American military and energy power in pursuit of an outcome — the definitive strategic defeat of Iran — that he has, by his own admission this week, failed to secure. Iran, he told the crowd in Washington, “still has some capability.” That is the honest assessment. Everything after it is the accounting.
V. A Timeline of the Word
February 28, 2026
U.S. and Israel launch coordinated strikes on Iran, opening the war. Iran responds by closing the Strait of Hormuz to most commercial traffic.
March 30
Trump publicly threatens to destroy Iran’s power plants, oil wells, Kharg Island, and “possibly all desalinization plants.” White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly defends the threat.
April 5–7
Trump escalates: “Praise be to Allah… you’ll be living in Hell.” Then: “A whole civilization will die tonight.” Over 50 House Democrats and Sens. Markey and Wyden call for the 25th Amendment or impeachment.
June 17
Trump and Pezeshkian sign the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding. Ceasefire takes effect. Sixty-day clock begins on nuclear talks.
June 26
Iran strikes the Singapore-flagged M/V Ever Lovely on the “Omani route.” U.S. Central Command retaliates against Iranian missile sites and coastal radar. Vance: “Violence will be met with violence.”
July 7
Iran strikes three vessels in or near the strait, including the Qatari LNG tanker al-Rakiyat. Qatar summons Iran’s deputy ambassador. Trump departs for NATO summit in Ankara.
July 8
U.S. launches strikes “twenty times harder.” Trump declares the MOU “over,” calls Iranian authorities “sick” and “scum,” and threatens: “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist.”
What The Framers Meant By “Unable”
The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides, in Section 4, that the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet may transmit to Congress a written declaration that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The declaration takes effect immediately. If the president disputes it and the vice president and Cabinet reaffirm, Congress makes the final determination by a two-thirds vote of each chamber. It has never been invoked.
The amendment, drafted in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and ratified in 1967, deliberately declines to define the word “unable.” Sen. Birch Bayh, the amendment’s principal author, wrote later that this was a considered choice — that no fixed definition could anticipate every form in which presidential incapacity might arrive. The framers left the judgment to the political institutions of the moment: the Cabinet closest to the president, and the Congress accountable to the public.
“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of… the principal officers of the executive departments… transmit… their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office…”
— U.S. Const. amend. XXV, § 4
Between April 6 and April 8, more than seventy congressional Democrats — including Sens. Ed Markey, Chris Murphy, and Ron Wyden, and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, Yassamin Ansari, Melanie Stansbury, Robert Garcia, Rashida Tlaib, and Raja Krishnamoorthi — publicly called for either impeachment or invocation of Section 4 in response to the president’s threat to destroy “a whole civilization.” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker made the same call, as did Sen. Dick Durbin. So did a striking constellation of former Trump allies: former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote simply, “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Evil and madness.” Tucker Carlson, on his program, suggested the president was threatening “a war crime, a moral crime.” Anthony Scaramucci called for the president’s removal directly.
The constitutional argument is not that the president is medically incapacitated in a way a physician could certify. It is that a president who signs an international agreement and publicly discards it three weeks later; who threatens the water supply of eleven million civilians as a negotiating tactic; who depletes the strategic petroleum reserve to its lowest level since Ronald Reagan’s first term and the munitions inventory needed to deter China, in pursuit of a war he cannot end — such a president is exhibiting a form of inability the framers understood well enough not to try to define. Judgment. Consistency. The capacity to keep the country’s word. Sen. Ron Johnson, no critic of this administration, said only that he was “hoping and praying” the threats were “bluster.” That is not a defense. It is a plea.
The practical barriers are real and should not be minimized. Section 4 requires the vice president and a Cabinet composed of loyalists to act against the president who appointed them. Congressional Republicans currently hold both chambers, and no serious count places the votes anywhere near two-thirds. Vice President Vance, who negotiated the Islamabad MOU and watched it discarded, appeared at a rally with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the same day dozens of Democrats called for his boss’s removal, and defended him.
But the barriers do not negate the constitutional case. The framers wrote Section 4 into the document precisely because they anticipated the political difficulty of using it. Difficulty is not the same as irrelevance. The record of what this president has done since March — the signed and abandoned MOU, the openly promised war crimes, the emptied arsenal and reserve — is a factual foundation for the constitutional question, whether or not the current Cabinet is willing to answer it. The record will outlast this Cabinet. So will the amendment.
VI. What Is An American Signature Worth
The immediate cost of the past week is measurable. Brent crude jumped more than 5 percent on Wednesday. Oil sanctions waivers on Iran were revoked. Qatar has summoned Iran’s deputy ambassador, but the Emirati foreign minister called his Iranian counterpart for the first time since the war began — a diplomatic maneuver that reads, from the region, as insurance against a Washington whose commitments no longer hold. South Korean cargo ships remain trapped in the strait. The oil price the American driver pays at the pump remains elevated because the president who promised to bring it down has instead spent the country’s emergency reserves on a war he cannot conclude.
The longer cost is harder to measure and worse. A great power’s foreign policy runs on the presumption that its written commitments mean something. That presumption is what makes deterrence work, what makes alliances hold, what allows adversaries to accept off-ramps rather than fighting to the last round. When the president of the United States signs a memorandum of understanding and then, three weeks later, calls it “over” because its inconvenient clause is being enforced by the country that inconveniently retained the leverage to enforce it — every future adversary of the United States updates their model of what an American signature is worth. So does every future ally. The damage is not repaired by the next administration’s inauguration. It compounds.
This is what a presidency has cost the country in twenty-one days. A word given and withdrawn. An arsenal three years from restoration. A reserve at forty-three-year lows. A promise of war crimes offered in public, on the president’s own preferred social media platform, in the president’s own words, without retraction. A NATO summit at which the American president called the leaders of a country he signed a peace deal with three weeks ago “sick” and “scum.” And a constitutional amendment, written by senators who understood that “inability” would arrive in forms they could not predict, sitting in the drawer that its framers hoped would never need to be opened.
Editorial Conclusion
A president’s signature is not a personal favor. It is the constitutional voice of the United States, and when it can be withdrawn on a whim it damages every alliance, every deterrent, and every future negotiation this country will ever undertake.
Donald Trump signed the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding on June 17. He declared it “over” on July 8. In between, he threatened to end a civilization, drained the strategic reserve to its lowest level since 1983, and consumed the munitions the country will need for the Pacific.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment does not define the word “unable” because its framers understood that inability arrives in forms no drafter can anticipate. This is one of those forms. The record demands that Congress and the Cabinet look at it honestly — and that history record who did, and who refused.
Sources & References
- CNBC · July 8, 2026“U.S. military launches new Iran strikes as Trump says ‘not sure’ he wants deal.” cnbc.com
- Al Jazeera · July 8, 2026“Iran signals defiance as Trump fumes over Strait of Hormuz strikes.” aljazeera.com
- CNN · July 7, 2026“Iran strikes three vessels near Strait of Hormuz as Trump arrives at NATO summit.” cnn.com
- The Hill · July 8, 2026“Trump calls Iran MOU ‘waste of time’ as strikes escalate.” thehill.com
- CNN · June 26, 2026“US strikes Iranian targets in response to attack on cargo ship.” cnn.com
- The Hill · June 26, 2026“Trump says Iran violated ceasefire with drone strike on ship in Strait of Hormuz.” thehill.com
- NBC News · June 27, 2026“U.S. launches additional Iran strikes as tensions flare up over Hormuz.” nbcnews.com
- Al Jazeera · March 30, 2026“Trump threatens to ‘blow up’ desalination plants in Iran if no deal reached.” aljazeera.com
- CNN · April 7, 2026“What to know about Trump’s threat to bomb Iran’s civilian infrastructure.” cnn.com
- PBS NewsHour · April 7, 2026“Experts say Trump’s threats to destroy Iran’s infrastructure could be considered war crime.” pbs.org
- Axios · March 31, 2026“Trump’s threat to bomb Iran’s water supply shows disregard for rules of war.” axios.com
- Military Times · May 27, 2026“US munitions depleted by Iran war will take years to restore, analysis finds.” militarytimes.com
- Al Jazeera · May 28, 2026“Rebuilding US weapons stockpile may ‘take years’ post-Iran war.” aljazeera.com
- Newsweek · June 17, 2026“Iran War: US Oil Reserve Hits All-Time Low As Deal Signing Looms.” newsweek.com
- The Hill · June 17, 2026“Donald Trump: Oil reserves could have run out in 4 weeks without Iran deal.” thehill.com
- CNN · April 8, 2026“25th Amendment: Democrats and right-wing voices call for removing Trump from office.” cnn.com
- NBC News · April 8, 2026“Dozens of Democrats call for Trump’s removal after his Iran threats.” nbcnews.com
- Axios · April 7, 2026“Trump 25th Amendment chatter erupts among Dems over Iran post.” axios.com
- WBEZ Chicago · April 7, 2026“Gov. Pritzker wants 25th Amendment invoked to remove President Trump from office over Iran threats.” wbez.org
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