20JUL

Trump expects Iran reply; signs nothing

3 min read

10:00UTC

Donald Trump told reporters on Sunday 10 May he expected an Iranian reply to the MOU very soon, while the White House presidential-actions index recorded no signed Iran instruments. Treasury staff did the work instead.

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Key takeaway

Trump expects a reply Tehran has just publicly priced as structurally untradeable.

Donald Trump spent the weekend telling reporters at The White House that he expected an Iran reply "very soon" ¹. The White House presidential-actions index records zero signed Iran executive instruments since the war opened. Friday's OFAC SDN action came from Treasury staff under standing IRAN-CON-ARMS-EO authority, not a fresh presidential order. The pattern matches Trump's 8 May posture, where three contradictory positions in one day (offering negotiation, threatening force, claiming the war "militarily won") all coexisted with no signed instrument behind any of them .

Spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei is fronting Tehran's verbal track, dismissing the missed 9 May reply window. Mohammad Mokhber is fronting the doctrinal track, naming Hormuz a nuclear-equivalent the same day. Trump SAYS, OFAC DOES; Baqaei SAYS, Mokhber DOES. Both governments' verbal tracks describe negotiation while their operational instruments widen the war's commercial and physical perimeter. The proposal Iran failed to answer by Saturday now compresses Tehran's window to 10-12 May, before Trump boards for Beijing and the Xi Jinping summit later this week.

Pakistan's military chief Asim Munir has pledged continued mediation through the Islamabad back-channel, but the Iranian doctrinal statement makes the trade Pakistan is supposed to broker structurally harder. Tehran has now publicly raised the bar on what verification access would have to deliver in return. Trump's verbal pressure operates on the assumption that escalation costs Iran more than holding out; the doctrinal statement is Tehran's reply that Hormuz leverage is worth more than relief from sanctions designations Treasury keeps expanding anyway.

Xi Jinping sits in Beijing with the leverage of MOFCOM's Blocking Rules order , the NFRA yuan-loan halt the Bessent letters triggered , and now the SDN designation of CGSTL on the Chinese commercial space sector. Trump arrives without a signed Iran instrument to trade, which leaves the negotiation reliant on the verbal track at exactly the point where the operational track has done all the talking on both sides.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

When the US president signs an executive order, it becomes official government policy with legal force, creates accountability, and puts things on the record. Trump has been talking about Iran for 71 days: threatening, promising talks, calling strikes a 'love tap', expecting replies 'very soon'. But none of it has been signed. The US government's official Iran sanctions actions in this period came from Treasury staff using old standing powers, not new presidential orders. Iran's government, when deciding whether to reply to the peace proposal, has to judge whether Trump's words carry any binding force. Baqaei stated on 9 May that Iran does not pay attention to deadlines, a response consistent with 71 days of unsigned US statements that could be reversed without legal process.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The White House presidential-actions index records zero Iran-related instruments across 71 days because presidential instruments commit the executive branch, constrain the president's own future options, and create congressional notification obligations under the War Powers Act.

Verbal statements and Truth Social posts carry none of those constraints. Trump's Iran management is designed around a maximum-flexibility operating model that his own legal team appears to have decided is best served by keeping all Iran commitments in the verbal domain.

The institutional consequence is that OFAC's 8 May SDN action operated under standing authority accumulated across prior administrations, not a new presidential order. Treasury was not waiting for White House direction; it was using pre-existing legal infrastructure.

This separation of verbal presidential track from institutional operational track allows the government to maintain maximum-pressure sanctions while leaving the president's verbal track available for diplomatic signalling in either direction.

What could happen next?

Risk
Iran's Baqaei explicitly dismissed deadlines as irrelevant. Without a signed US instrument that creates legal obligations, Tehran has no mechanism to assess Washington's credibility and no basis for a written reply that commits Iranian state resources.
Immediate · 0.81
Consequence
Trump boards for Beijing on or around 14 May. If no MOU reply arrives before departure, the Iran negotiation pauses while Trump pursues the Xi summit, handing Iran a de facto extension of the current blockade status quo.
Short term · 0.76
Meaning
The verbal-only pattern means all major US Iran commitments, including the Operation EPIC FURY declaration and the 15,000-personnel CENTCOM announcement, remain legally ungrounded and reversible without process.
Medium term · 0.79

Source Landscape

This story draws on centre-left-leaning sources from Qatar

Qatar

Primary parallel: During the 1986 Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration ran a covert Iran arms channel through NSC staff for fourteen months without a signed presidential finding. The verbal-only track enabled the operation but also made it legally indefensible when exposed; Trump's 71-day verbal-only Iran campaign carries the same structural risk of implementation ambiguity and retrospective deniability.

Counter-parallel: In August 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed National Security Directive 45 within three days of Iraq's Kuwait invasion, establishing the legal framework for Operation Desert Shield.

The rapid signing enabled coalition building because allies could read the signed US commitment and calibrate their own positions. Baqaei's explicit dismissal of deadlines illustrates the same logic in reverse: without a signed US instrument, Tehran has no basis on which to assess Washington's credibility.

Consensus view: Brookings Institution's Suzanne Maloney assesses the verbal-only pattern as structurally intentional rather than administratively delayed. Trump's 71-day run without a signed Iran instrument allows him to claim credit for any diplomatic progress through Witkoff or Pakistan without creating a reversible executive paper trail that constrains future options. Verbal commitments can be withdrawn without legal process; signed EOs cannot.

Counter-view: AEI's Michael Rubin argues the signing gap reflects internal White House disagreement rather than deliberate strategy: Hegseth's 'not a regime-change war' position and Rubio's 'welcome ending the governing system' statement reflect a cabinet whose Iran policy lacks a coherent written doctrine, so no instrument gets signed because no instrument has survived interagency review.

Key tension: Whether the absence of signed instruments leaves Trump maximum flexibility ahead of the Beijing summit, or whether the pattern signals that Washington lacks the internal consensus needed to credibly commit to any written deal with Tehran.

First Reported In

Update #93 · Tanker hits Doha while Qatar mediates

Al Jazeera· 10 May 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Trump expects Iran reply; signs nothing

The verbal-versus-kinetic mirror is now explicit on both sides: Trump and Baqaei talk while OFAC and Mokhber act, with the operational pace setting the war's perimeter rather than the negotiating one.

Led to

Iran's 10-point reply, Trump's 14-second rejection

Trump's 10 May anticipation of an Iranian reply preceded the actual transmission and verbal rejection cycle that played out the same day.

Occurred 10 May 2026

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Different Perspectives

Kuwait

Kuwait absorbed the Iranian strike that knocked generating units offline at a combined power-and-desalination plant on 17 July, the event that finally moved freight and insurance in lockstep with Brent. The strike hit essential civilian infrastructure, not a trading desk's benchmark.

Asian buyers (Singapore)

Singapore's middle distillates rose 12% month-to-date to 8.91m barrels and fuel oil passed 19m barrels on a 105% net-import surge, buyers retaining barrels as the East-West arbitrage window narrows. Cargoes are being stockpiled ahead of further Hormuz-driven freight repricing rather than released west.

Austria (Coreper holdout)

Vienna is blocking the same package over roughly EUR 2bn of frozen Russian assets earmarked for Raiffeisen, a domestic banking dispute with no connection to the oil cap racing toward its 23 July expiry. The linkage forces the whole package to wait on a bilateral compensation fight.

Greece (Coreper holdout)

Athens is holding the 21st sanctions package at the 22 July Coreper vote over Russian LNG re-export rights, a condition unrelated to the oil price cap itself, leaving the $44.10 freeze one day from expiry without a deal. Greece's own tanker registry gives it a direct stake in how any shadow-fleet measures are drafted.

Marine underwriters (Gulf war-risk)

Hull war-risk cover for Hormuz transits widened to a 3-10% band on 17 July with 5% the emerging norm, up from a 3-4% baseline set in late June, the first repricing in six weeks to track a flat-price move rather than lag it. Cover resets on actuarial evidence of loss, not on diplomatic or price signals.

Money managers (CFTC-tracked)

The CFTC's week-to-14-July snapshot, released 17 July, showed WTI managed-money net long collapsing 69% to 19,783 contracts and a standalone 60,141-contract net short on Brent Last Day (NYMEX). Both readings predate the Kuwait strike and the 20 July escalation, so any covering since is not yet visible in public data.