American power has a tell. When faced with a war it wants to end, Washington develops a comprehensive plan that includes phased withdrawals, monitoring arrangements, economic incentives, and a timeline. It then acts as though the document itself were the peace.
This has gone on for decades, through one Middle Eastern conflict after another, with the same confidence in the process and the expectation of the same result. One side flies in with hope and a document. The other lives with history. That gap has defeated every agreement before this one, and no drafting exercise has ever closed it.
For years, I was asked to assess the legal risk in agreements like this one across the Middle East and Africa: whether a given commitment would hold as the parties’ interests shifted. I thought about that work this week as Washington celebrated its memorandum of understanding with Iran.
The relief is real and well deserved: a 60-day ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and the end of hostilities after a difficult war. However, old patterns persist because it only offers a temporary window to de-escalate nearly 50 years of hostility. This cannot serve as a final resolution.
Sanctions waivers are being issued, while the most difficult issues are being postponed to future negotiations that have yet to start. The key promise—that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb—has been repeatedly made by Tehran over the years.
Even the signing process showed signs of instability; the vice-president’s initial meeting in Switzerland was canceled at the last moment, and Israel attacked Beirut on a morning when the White House was optimistic about peace. Ultimately, it appears to be a carefully crafted process imposed on forces it cannot influence.
This goes beyond any one administration. It is the reflex of an entire order. The generation that built the postwar system did so amid the rubble of two world wars. The United Nations, Bretton Woods and NATO: all these institutions were not the projects of idealists but a shield, improvised by frightened people against a catastrophe they had personally lived through.
Their successors took over the shield but lost sight of its original purpose. As the fear that once motivated its creation faded, the machinery continued operating independently, with its summits, signed agreements, and established rules. Over time, the process itself became more significant than its intended goal.
The recipients understood all of this long before the diplomats who authored the documents. The proposals didn’t persuade because they mirrored a reality the recipients already experienced — on disputed land, among the dead, with grievances that no timetable could resolve.
They were polite to the visiting negotiators, like guests who traveled great distances but brought the wrong tools. While the gap between the written proposals and the ongoing conflict was obvious to any observer, hardly anyone recognized it.
Two men made careers out of saying it aloud. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump both understood that the order had hollowed out and that those running it were going through the motions, no longer believing in it.
But noticing the decay is not the same as remembering why the order was built in the first place. Putin chose to wreck it from the outside. This week, Trump holds a deal in one hand and the threat to go “right back to dropping bombs” in the other. Neither man has what the founders had: knowledge of what it costs when there is no order at all, paid for in ruin.
That is the hard lesson buried in this week’s agreement, and in every commitment I was asked to weigh for the risk that it would fail. The postwar order was not engineered from clever frameworks. It was built by people who had seen the alternative firsthand and were terrified of it.
You cannot manufacture that terror in a conference room, and no memorandum can substitute for it. The next settlement that truly holds, in the Middle East or anywhere else, will probably be built the way the last one was: not from wisdom but from exhaustion, after the disaster the process was meant to prevent has already arrived.
I would like to be wrong about that. Nothing I learned weighing these agreements has ever given me reason to think that I am.
Eric Alter is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and a former UN civil servant.
