The memorandum of understanding on peaceful coexistence between the United States and Iran is not a diplomatic achievement. It is a diplomatic hallucination — a document that uses the language of peace to describe an arrangement in which none of the parties committed to peace are required to stop planning, funding, or executing war. It is a logical impossibility: a coexistence agreement with parties whose founding charters, operational budgets, and active military commands are organized around the elimination of one of the parties to the agreement.

That party is Israel. And Israel was not asked whether it consented to being coexisted with under these terms.

The MOU’s fatal deficiency is not procedural — not that the instrument is non-binding, though it is, or that verification mechanisms are weak, though they are. The deficiency is categorical. Peaceful coexistence has a logical prerequisite this document did not meet and did not attempt to meet: the operational renunciation of eliminationism. A commitment, however cold and minimal, that the parties will cease to plan, fund, and direct forces whose explicit mission is the other party’s destruction.

No such commitment was extracted. No such commitment was sought. The MOU forgot to ask Iran to stop.

What Coexistence Actually Requires

Coexistence does not require ideological........

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