The US-Iran MoU looks at managing the pain rather than ending the war

When US President Donald Trump and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf put an electronic pen to paper on a 14-point memorandum of understanding (MoU) in June, it was supposed to halt a 109-day war between the two countries. Mediated heavily by Pakistan and Qatar, the framework lifts the US naval blockade on Iran in exchange for Tehran reopening the vital Strait of Hormuz, after a bout of economic warfare that caused global energy prices to skyrocket and prompted market instability. Despite this, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz remains volatile. While the number of tit-for-tat attacks between the US and Iran has markedly decreased since the MoU was signed, they have not stopped entirely, with clashes on Friday and Saturday between the two sides. As Washington and Tehran enter a 60-day window to negotiate a permanent settlement to the conflict, a critical question looms: Is the MoU a genuine step towards a lasting peace, or just a temporary mechanism to put the conflict on hold? Analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera view this as an “agreement of the compelled” – a truce born on mutual pain and not a movement towards trust-building. The threshold of mutual pain In conflict resolution theory, warring parties rarely come to the negotiating table seeking peace; they arrive when they hit a “mutually hurting stalemate”, as appears to be the case with the US and Iran. …