Trump Personally Ends The War With Iran He Personally Started, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Making War And Peace Was A Power The Constitution Shared With Congress

VERSAILLES, France. President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday signed a sweeping memorandum of understanding with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian inside the Palace of Versailles, committing the United States to terminate all sanctions on Iran, to release the country's frozen funds and assets, and to lift its naval blockade, thereby resolving a conflict the President had spent the previous year personally escalating.

The agreement, announced to the world through a video released by French President Emmanuel Macron rather than by either government, commits Washington to issue Treasury waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil and to restore the banking, insurance, and shipping services required to sell it. In exchange, Iran agreed to permit commercial vessels free passage through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days, a courtesy it had withdrawn only after the United States bombed three of its nuclear sites in 2025 and fired 49 cruise missiles at it earlier this month.

Administration officials described the document as a memorandum rather than a treaty, a distinction that spared it the two-thirds Senate ratification the Constitution requires for treaties, just as the bombing that preceded it had been conducted without the congressional authorization the Constitution requires for war. Both the war and its conclusion were thus carried out entirely within the executive branch, an arrangement one official praised for its speed.

Asked what he would tell members of Congress who had criticized the deal, the President answered that "anybody that's been critical of it has to be educated, even if they're friends of mine," adding that the critics "know they're wrong" and that negotiators had secured "100% inspections." Hours later, the Senate voted 50 to 48 to direct the President to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran unless Congress explicitly authorized them, a resolution the White House noted it was free to ignore.

The President hailed the memorandum as proof that he alone could deliver peace, an assessment complicated only by the fact that he alone had delivered the war. Sixty days remained, officials said, to convert the understanding into a final deal, a window that began the moment the cameras at Versailles stopped recording.

At press time, the President had announced that nuclear inspectors would be allowed into Iran at "the appropriate time," a date he declined to specify and which the 60-day clock had not yet reached.