Geneva, Switzerland
Heading into an al fresco dinner Monday evening overlooking the azure Lake Geneva shoreline, the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations were hoping to gain clarity on what, exactly, President Donald Trump’s new arrangement with Iran entailed.
After almost two hours, the sun had nearly set. At least some of the leaders walked away from the custom-built dinner pavilion just as mystified about the details of the plan as they were walking in, according to two officials familiar with the matter.
A day after Trump applied his electronic signature to the agreement, the exact terms of the pact remain known to only a few. Neither side has published the one-and-a-half page text that was formalized in the virtual signing Sunday, leading to sometimes contradictory statements from Washington and Tehran. Even officials inside Trump’s government offered slightly different takes on how the plan would work.
Whether any of those matters are clarified by the time Vice President JD Vance is expected to attend a formal signing ceremony in Switzerland on Friday remains to be seen. In the telling of one senior US official, the text of the memorandum will be released well before that date, laying out a timeline of a day or two before the document is finally revealed publicly in the name of “transparency.”
But a few hours later, Trump, sitting alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, offered a different deadline.
“I want it to be released. So probably pretty soon,” Trump said. “I would say some time after Friday.”
Macron and other Group of 7 leaders who have assembled in the alpine resort Évian-les-Bains would certainly like to take a glimpse of the agreement before then. Neither they nor anyone else outside the negotiating parties appear to have read the text, despite offering hearty congratulations to Trump for helping secure it.
Before a stray comment from Vance in a Monday morning television interview, it wasn’t even clear whether the document had been signed at all. A senior administration official said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and top negotiator, signed for Iran; Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, this official claimed, “just doesn’t sign these agreements.”
Tuesday’s meetings at a luxury hotel perched above Lake Geneva will offer another chance at clarity. Macron has invited the rulers of Egypt, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to join in a lunchtime discussion with the G7 leaders. Officials from those countries, and Qatar in particular, have been intimately involved in the negotiating process. And the US expects Gulf nations to help foot the bill for a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran.
Monday’s dinner was billed as a meal focused on “working together to address major international challenges.” Trump was seated between Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, two leaders he’s spent the last several months excoriating for not stepping up during the Iran war and, in some cases, openly questioning his decision-making beforehand.
Trump’s aides said heading into the summit they expected European nations to step up to help remove mines from the Strait of Hormuz now that active conflict has ended — something France and Britain have both said they’d be willing to do.
But without clarity on what has been agreed to, some European officials said it would be difficult to make commitments and implement them without knowing more of how the agreement addresses the future of the strait.
The secrecy has led to alarm even among some of Trump’s conservative allies about what, exactly, he signed off on.
“I have asked for days, why can’t we, the people, see the damn MOU? Not through people briefed by an anonymous person. Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like this. If it is a great outcome for peace, then release it,” conservative commentator Mark Levin wrote on X. The president has frequently praised Levin and his weekend show on Fox News.
Without a public text to read from, gaps in public understanding of the agreement have also emerged.
On the Strait of Hormuz, for instance, Trump declared the waterway would operate “permanently toll-free.” But the Iranians insisted they would control the passage and apply fees if necessary. And Vance, the other American signatory to the accord, said while the US “expectation” was a strait without tolls, a final determination would only come during future talks.
“That’s the sort of thing that we’re going to figure out in these technical negotiations,” Vance said on CNBC, the first in a string of television interviews he did to try to sell the agreement and explain its contents.
The tolls are not the only issue that’s expected to be ironed out in the forthcoming “technical negotiations.” So, too, will the fate of Iran’s nuclear program: what to do with its nearly 1,000 pounds of near-bomb-grade uranium or its sophisticated centrifuges, and what inspections will be allowed.
Trump’s aides insist Iran will not see any financial relief until complying with its side of the bargain. But with so much left to negotiate, it wasn’t clear even to US officials what steps Tehran would need to take to satisfy American demands.
“Sanctions relief is not tied specifically to any particular conduct,” a senior administration official said Monday. “It’s tied generally to them behaving more appropriately.”
How and when “behaving more appropriately” would be determined wasn’t specified. But a separate administration official hinted there could be steps toward economic relief taken relatively quickly as confidence building measures for both sides.
“We’ll do some small gestures of that in the beginning, if they make some small gestures to us that show that they’re willing to meet their commitments,” the official said, citing sanctions relief and unfreezing Iranian assets as potential “gestures” under consideration.
Many of the Gulf nations that the US hopes will invest in a reconstruction fund will be represented at Tuesday’s expanded summit talks in Geneva.
One of the officials described the initiative as “corralling other countries to make investments.”
