Iran…Trump…Conflict/War…Evening… June 17, 2026…The Cease Fire Agreement IS Signed….

“This was not easy,” Trump said right before he signed it, according to a video posted to social media by Macron.

In Tehran, a stone-faced President Masoud Pezeshkian signed the deal on behalf of Iran, according to the state-run IRNA news agency, which posted an image of him holding up the deal with his signature and Trump’s……

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NY Times…

It was less than 15 weeks ago when President Trump, at the height of his bravado about how the war with Iran would end, declared “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”

When the text of the deal intended to wind down the conflict was finally released on Wednesday, read aloud paragraph by paragraph by a senior administration official who stopped to defend each section, it read nothing like a surrender document. Instead, the Iranians emerged from a confrontation with the world’s most powerful military having not only survived, but with much to celebrate.

It starts with the resumption of Tehran’s ability to reap billions of dollars in oil sales, lifting pressure on the struggling regime even as negotiators prepare to begin haggling over a far more lengthy and critical document: the one Mr. Trump insisted in an interview on Sunday will arrest Iran’s nuclear program for the next 15 or 20 years.

For a president who prizes leverage above all else, that decision is just another mystery of the war. But the wording of the “Memorandum of Understanding” also suggests that, over time, Iran may negotiate some permanent way to exercise sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. That seems in contradiction to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s declarations just a few weeks ago that anything other than the kind of free passage through the strait that the world knew before the war was “not acceptable” and “cannot happen.”

And the memorandum, signed on Wednesday evening by Iran’s president and Mr. Trump, describes a pathway in which Iran could begin receiving billions of dollars in assets that have been frozen for years. Mr. Trump insists the money will only be released in return for “good behavior.” But it is essentially the same concession that Barack Obama made 11 years ago, and that Mr. Trump has savaged ever since.

As Mr. Trump reminds reporters — often angrily — the United States did have many accomplishments on the battlefield: It sank Iran’s less-than-impressive navy, wiped out its small air force, destroyed much of Iran’s defense industrial base and demolished some of its missile emplacements and mobile launchers. But that was not Mr. Trump’s goal. As he said at the opening of the campaign, he sought the total destruction of the nuclear and missile programs, the fall of the regime and, as he suggested later on, American control of the country’s oil industry.

In the next few days, the details of this agreement will be picked apart. Hard-liners in Mr. Trump’s party have already been expressing objections. So have the Israelis, frozen out of the negotiations and fearful they are being forced by Mr. Trump into a cease-fire with Hezbollah that will interfere with their ability to rip apart the terror group. Historians will grapple for years about the lessons of a conflict in which the United States spent tens of billions of dollars, with 13 Americans and more than 3,000 Iranians reported to have been killed….

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ISW…Iran Update Special Report, June 17, 2026

1. The United States and Iran signed the memorandum of understanding (MoU) on June 17. Iran is claiming that the final MoU text satisfies some of its key war aims related to Lebanon and the Strait of Hormuz. The final MoU is basically unchanged from the version provided to Bloomberg on June 16, except for text changes in clauses one and five that Iran reportedly requested.
2. Top Iranian officials are using these changes to imply that they have satisfied their key war aims of controlling the Strait of Hormuz and preserving Hezbollah. This demonstrates the degree of ambiguity inherent in this MoU and suggests that the United States and Iran have divergent views of the agreed-upon text.
3. Iran will likely use renewed economic access under the MoU to reconstitute members of the Axis of Resistance, particularly Hezbollah, during the 60-day negotiation period. Iran has already told Hezbollah that Iran will increase its funding as soon as possible once the United States unfreezes Iranian assets.
4. The United States reportedly conditioned economic support for Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al Zaydi’s government on its ability to meet several conditions, including disarming Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and dismantling their financial networks. The United States demanded the removal of Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) leaders associated with Iranian-backed Iraqi militias before integrating the PMF into official Iraqi security institutions, according to political sources speaking to Iraqi media on June 17.