For the first time in 110 days, major commercial ships are moving through the Strait of Hormuz again. That's the good news. The bad news is that Benjamin Netanyahu is already planting his flag on the part of the deal he doesn't like, JD Vance can't seem to get on a plane, and several Republican senators are publicly asking what exactly their president just signed.
What Actually Happened Here
President Trump and Iran's president signed a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday that does two things: it reopens the Strait of Hormuz immediately, and it kicks off 60 days of direct U.S.-Iran technical talks covering a broad range of disputes, with Iran's nuclear program sitting at the top of the list. According to CBS News, at least 10 commercial vessels were transiting the strait Thursday morning, hours after the agreement was signed.
Lloyd's List Intelligence, a maritime data company, confirmed that major shipowners began moving vessels through the passage for the first time since February, when the closure began. Richard Meade, editor in chief of Lloyd's List, told a media briefing that ships owned by major companies had been effectively marooned there for 110 days. The strait carries roughly 20 percent of the world's total oil and natural gas supply, so its closure hasn't exactly been a minor inconvenience. It's been an energy catastrophe.
The memorandum itself, per a senior U.S. official who read the text to CBS News, calls for the immediate and permanent end of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and commits both sides to refrain from initiating any war or military operation against each other going forward. Clean language. Aspirational language. The kind of language that sounds great until you ask Israel what it thinks about the Lebanon part.
Netanyahu's Answer Is No
Benjamin Netanyahu did not wait long to make his position clear. Speaking Thursday night at a road inauguration event, because Israeli prime ministers apparently cannot stop doing ribbon-cuttings in the middle of international crises, Netanyahu said he has no intention of withdrawing Israeli forces from their security zone in southern Lebanon.
"Just as we restored security and prosperity to the Gaza envelope, so we will restore security and prosperity to the northern communities," Netanyahu said, according to CBS News. "This requires maintaining the security zone in southern Lebanon, and it dictates that we will not withdraw from there as long as Israel's security needs require it."
Hezbollah has already announced that Israeli forces remaining in Lebanese territory constitutes a breach of the agreement. Iran has said the same thing. So the deal is, at this moment, in a genuinely precarious place. Netanyahu did thank the United States for fighting "shoulder to shoulder" with Israel during the war, which is the diplomatic equivalent of patting someone on the head before ignoring everything they asked you to do. According to Reuters, Israel is now in active negotiations with Washington trying to keep its forces deployed in Lebanon while still technically being seen as compliant with the deal. Good luck with that math.
Reuters is also reporting that the U.S.-Iran agreement explicitly states that the Israeli military remaining in Lebanon would be considered a violation. That's not ambiguous. That's not a gray area. That is a sentence with a subject, a verb, and a very clear meaning.
Vance Was Going to Switzerland, Then He Wasn't
Here is a small but telling detail about how this is going. JD Vance held a press conference Thursday morning and told reporters he planned to fly to Switzerland that night to help kick off the nuclear talks, which he expected to begin this weekend. Iran, he explained, is "not an easy country to get out of," so the exact timing depended on when their delegation could travel. Hours later, the White House told reporters Vance is no longer departing Thursday night.
A White House spokesperson told the press pool that "the logistics of these negotiations have never been simple or predictable" and that the U.S. delegation remains "prepared to depart at the first available opportunity." That's not a lie, exactly. It's the kind of thing you say when the plan fell apart and you don't want to explain why. CBS News has the full statement. The talks are still expected to happen. We just don't know when, or who will show up, or whether the foundational disagreement over Lebanon will be resolved before anyone gets on a plane.
Republicans Are Not Thrilled Either
The White House spent part of Thursday afternoon on a briefing call with congressional leaders from both parties, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with top members of the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees. CBS News confirmed the call, with Punchbowl first reporting it.
The reaction among Republicans has not been uniformly celebratory. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is not someone known for going out of his way to embarrass Trump, put out a statement saying he is "concerned that the memorandum of understanding negotiates away the victories of Operation Epic Fury in ways that are completely out of step with the President's goals." That is a notable thing for the chairman of the Armed Services Committee to say about a deal his own president just signed. CBS News reported on the statement directly.
There are a few ways to read that. One is that Wicker is genuinely alarmed by the substance of what Trump agreed to. Another is that the administration failed to adequately brief key senators before going public, which is a recurring problem with this White House. Possibly both things are true simultaneously. That tends to be how it works.
The 60-Day Clock
Under the memorandum, the two sides have 60 days of technical talks to figure out the future of Iran's nuclear program. That is the main event. Everything else, the Hormuz reopening, the Lebanon provisions, the broader ceasefire language, is the scaffolding around the central question of whether Iran gives up enough of its nuclear capability to make this deal mean something.
Sixty days is not a lot of time to resolve a problem that has been building for decades. Iran has been enriching uranium at levels that alarm nonproliferation experts. The Trump administration spent its first term blowing up the 2015 nuclear agreement that the Obama administration negotiated, watching Iran respond by accelerating its program, and then spent years insisting maximum pressure would bring Tehran to its knees. Now they're back at the table. There's an argument that pressure worked. There's an equally strong argument that Iran is sitting down because it fought a war, took some hits, and sees a window of leverage before anything changes on the ground. Both things can be true at once. The next 60 days will tell us which reading is more accurate.
The Dingo Take
Credit where it's due: ships are moving through the Strait of Hormuz again. An energy crisis that cost the global economy a staggering amount over 110 days has at least been interrupted, if not resolved. If the memorandum holds, that matters. Real people have been paying for that closure at the pump and in their heating bills, and they didn't get a vote on any of the decisions that caused it.
But the deal is already wobbling in ways that are hard to ignore. Netanyahu is publicly refusing to comply with a provision that Iran and Hezbollah have both identified as a red line. Vance couldn't get on a plane to Switzerland. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee is saying the president gave away too much. The administration is briefing Congress after the fact rather than before, which is not how you build the kind of institutional buy-in that would help a deal like this survive politically in the months ahead.
The Hormuz reopening is real and it matters. But a memorandum of understanding is not a treaty, it is not verified, it is not ratified, and it contains a Lebanon provision that a major U.S. ally is already treating as optional. The 60-day clock starts now. Watch what happens in Lebanon before you decide whether to celebrate.
