25MAY

Trump expects Iran reply; signs nothing

3 min read

13:55UTC

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

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Lloyd's of London

The Joint War Committee left Hormuz war-risk premiums at $10-14 million per voyage on 25 May, declining to move on Brent's 5% fall. The JWC's protocol requires a UN Security Council resolution or bilateral government certification letter before de-listing, and neither has arrived: a verbal understanding does not satisfy the formal condition the reinsurance market's treaty terms require.

Gulf Arab producers

Saudi Arabia and UAE depend on Hormuz for their own crude exports; Aramco CEO Nasser has warned no oil market recovery arrives until 2027 if the blockade continues past mid-June. Monday's $98.96 Brent settlement shortens nothing for Gulf producers without a signed instrument and a Pentagon mine-clearance timeline that runs up to six months post-ceasefire.

Qatar

Qatar holds $12bn of frozen Iranian assets at the centre of the sequencing dispute but cannot release them without explicit US Treasury authorisation, given the original freeze was a US instrument. As the asset-holding state, Qatar's leverage is real but passive: it is the escrow holder, not the decision-maker, and any resolution requires US Treasury sign-off that Trump has withheld.

Pakistan

With both Prime Minister Sharif and army chief Munir simultaneously in Beijing on 25 May, Pakistan has for the first time consolidated its civilian and military mediation tracks under China's roof. Munir's direct Tehran-to-Beijing flight signals that the security and financial threads of the sequencing problem are now being worked in parallel rather than sequentially.

China

Beijing hosted Pakistan's principal mediators and Iran's China envoy Ghalibaf simultaneously on 25 May while its banking regulator capped new state-bank lending to five sanctioned refiners. China is simultaneously the most credible third-party underwriter of the $12bn sequencing and the state whose institutions face live OFAC secondary-sanctions exposure if the deadlock persists through GL V's expiry.

United States

Trump posted on 24 May that the blockade holds until a deal is certified and signed, ruling out the informal MOU structure both sides had been building. The 'certified, and signed' condition is the first operational bar Trump has attached in 87 days, but it arrived without an executive instrument, maintaining the gap between posted ultimatum and signed US policy.