The last few days have seen the spectacle of Trump yet again announcing that a peace deal with Iran has been reached. He has said this about 40 times before so one can be excused for being skeptical. This time is different as even the Iranians said that a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ had been arrived at and would be signed on Friday, making the claim more plausible. The details of the agreement were leaked from the US side and CNN published what it claimed was the text of the 14-point agreement. As is often the case, these things are deliberately leaked in order to gauge the feedback so that claims can be walked back if necessary.

Iran has agreed to re-open the Strait of Hormuz for traffic with no charge for 60 days, and promised not to “procure or develop nuclear weapons” and to allow the IAEA back into the country. The latter had been part of the JCPOA negotiated earlier that Trump scrapped.

As for sanctions, the US has agreed to “terminate all sanctions” both its own unilateral ones and the multilateral ones. The US and its partners will also “develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development” of Iran. The MOU also states that the “US Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.” and the US “undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU.” The US also”undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.”

Many of the details are to be determined within the 60-day period following the signing but as I read it, it looks like the Iranians have got much of what they wanted in return for re-opening the Strait of Hormuz
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While Trump has been vacillating over whether there is an imminent peace deal or whether he will resume bombing, there clearly have been ongoing negotiations. What has been lacking in US media are details about what the deal may contain, other than vague statements that Trump has denounced as false because it seems like he has gained little. Trump has made at least 40 claims that a deal is imminent and he is such a liar that it is hard to take seriously anything he says. But Drop Site News has been monitoring Iranian media and they have published what the Iranians see as the framework of the proposed deal.

A number of terms in the memorandum of understanding (MOU) have been reported on by Iranian state media, although the details have yet to be finalized and have not been officially confirmed by Tehran or Washington. They include:

• A permanent and immediate cessation of war on all fronts, including Lebanon.
• Lifting of the U.S. naval blockade within 30 days.
• Commitments from the U.S. not to expand its military presence in the region.
• Sixty days of negotiations to reach a final agreement “based on nuclear issues and the complete lifting of” sanctions.
• Reopening the strait of Hormuz within 30 days “with Iranian arrangements.”
• Final negotiations will not begin before the release of half of Iran’s frozen funds, the suspension of oil sanctions and the lifting of the naval blockade. “Discussions about Iran’s missile program and support for resistance groups have been definitively removed from the agenda,” IRNA reported.
• The 60-day period will address three issues left unresolved in the current MOU: the continuation of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program, the lifting of sanctions, and a mechanism for compensating Iran for its losses.
• “If Tehran decides to sign the memorandum, some of its frozen funds will be released immediately, and the rest gradually,” IRNA reported.
• The question of U.S. sanctions will reportedly be adjudicated during the 60-day negotiating period.
• The memorandum contains no Iranian commitments on the nuclear issue and no U.S. commitment to lift sanctions.

Iran clarifies Hormuz control in light of the deal: Iran’s official state news agency released a statement stressing that “contrary to what is being circulated by Western media, Iran will not commit to relinquishing control of the Strait of Hormuz.”

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Trump’s flailing over how to extricate himself from the Iran fiasco gets ever more desperate. It would be comical (and indeed late night talk show hosts are ridiculing him on this) if it did not have such dire consequences. Trump keeps switching from saying that a peace deal with Iran is imminent and will be signed in a matter of days and that they have pretty much agreed to all his demands (which the Iranians stoutly deny) to then threatening to start bombing, to then calling it off (sometimes all within one day) saying that the Iranians have agreed to a deal on his terms, which they deny again.

In the latest chaotic reversals, he seemed outraged that the Iranian drones had shot down a US helicopter and in retaliation he started bombing again.

The United States launched a second round of airstrikes on Iran into Thursday morning after President Donald Trump warned that Tehran would “pay the price” for stalled negotiations, and Iran responded with strikes targeting Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.
…

The U.S. Central Command said it had “completed” its latest round of airstrikes just before sunrise in Iran. The military command said the strikes came “in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression” and targeted “Iranian military surveillance capabilities, communication systems and air defense sites.” It did not elaborate on the damage done by the strikes, which it said were carried out by the U.S. Air Force, Marines and Navy.
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Iran responded by launching strikes on Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, and Kuwait closed its airspace as its air defenses fought off the attack. Kuwait’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation said flights were being diverted to other airports, without elaborating.

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Tuesday saw primary races in many states. Most primary races (unlike the few ‘jungle’ primaries in states like California) are within parties to see who gets to be the party’s nominee in the general election and hence they are better seen as indicators of the relative strengths of the competing factions within the parties.

And yesterday’s results showed promising results for progressives in the Democratic party.

Bernie Sanders and his progressive allies are on a hot streak.

The Vermont senator’s endorsed candidates cleaned house on Tuesday, a coast-to-coast show of force headlined by a resounding win for his embattled Senate pick in Maine, Graham Platner, in spite of days of turmoil that had thrown his candidacy into question.

It wasn’t just Platner. Hours before his victory was called, Sanders-backed Randy Villegas advanced to a runoff ahead of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s endorsed candidate, as he fights to face Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) in a swingy Central Valley seat. Other Sanders-backed victors for House seats in recent weeks include Adam Hamawy and Analilia Mejia in New Jersey, Sam Forstag in Montana, Brian Poindexter in Ohio and Bob Brooks in a key Pennsylvania swing district.
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“Progressives are on the march,” Sanders declared last week in a statement lauding his slate of “candidates willing to stand up for working people [who] are taking on the establishment and WINNING.” On Tuesday, he commended Platner’s “landslide victory.”

The senator’s support has been instrumental in powering unknown candidates to major wins this cycle, a demonstration of just how much political influence the 84-year-old progressive leader still commands.

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He attended game 3 in New York of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio. Given that he has been booed whenever he shows up at sports events and is shown on the bog screen, at this game they showed him during the playing of the national anthem, no doubt thinking that people would not boo at that time.

No such luck.

Donald Trump was loudly booed when he was shown on the video screens at Madison Square Garden on Monday night before Game 3 of the NBA finals between the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks.

Trump was shown on the jumbotron while the Star-Spangled Banner was being sung before the game, and jeers and boos broke out around the arena. The president was shown for a little over eight seconds and held a salute the whole time with a smile on his face. A few seconds later, the video board showed Knicks players in line and the boos turned to cheers.

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During their heyday, empires seem permanent, so strong and their rivals so weak that it is hard to imagine them being displaced from their position of dominance.But empires do die and historian of empires Albert McCoy writes that all the signs indicate that we are witnessing the end of the American empire.

Writing in 1942, during some of Britain’s darkest days in World War II, the editors of the venerable London Times looked far beyond the relentless German attacks on their forces in Egypt or the Nazi U-Boat sinkings of Royal Navy ships in the Atlantic to predict their empire’s future with an uncommon prescience. With its contradictory motto of “Imperium et Libertas” (Empire and Liberty), the vast British Empire, which still covered a quarter of the globe, had already become what those editors called “a self-liquidating concern.” Once the “temporary circumstances” that had allowed Britain’s ascent — naval dominance, industrial preeminence, and “the relative weakness of rival states” — faded, that empire’s “ultimate reliance on coercion” could no longer hold. Ready for self-governance, Britain’s many colonies, the editors suggested, would soon begin breaking away and so eclipse the empire. And that prediction couldn’t have been more accurate. Within five years of that editorial’s publication, the British Empire had already started to break apart.

Writing in a May 2026 edition of the New York Times, contributing editor Christopher Caldwell made a strikingly similar prediction about the future of U.S. global hegemony. Under the provocative headline “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” Caldwell noted some unsettling parallels between the fate of America today and Great Britain 80 years ago. Back then, England was “deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent,” and found itself “essentially bankrupt” by the end of World War II. Apart from its “ill-fated attempt” to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, however, it managed to decolonize in a successful fashion by giving up “territories it could no longer afford.” As he points out, Britain even “wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions.”

At the start of his second term as president in 2025, Donald Trump, Caldwell continued, “had a chance of pulling off something similar” by withdrawing “to a less expansive sphere of influence” and “refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere.” Caldwell considered that strategy potentially “workable” since “imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends.” Instead of keeping to that plan, however, Trump “has overextended the empire dangerously” by his intervention in Iran, which has now become nothing less than a “watershed in the decline of the American empire.”

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