“Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday evening, while announcing a deal with Iran to end the war, which led to thousands of deaths and disrupted the global economy with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The agreement between the United States and Iran on Sunday, which is expected to be formally signed on Jun. 19 in Switzerland,  should neither be dismissed nor overstated. It is not a breakthrough in the grand sense of that word. It does not reconcile the irreconcilable American and Iranian narratives, settle the nuclear dispute, or inaugurate a new regional order.

What it does is more modest, but nonetheless important: it creates a breathing space in which diplomacy can try to recover from the violence that nearly buried it. That pause was badly needed. More than three months after the US and Israel launched their war against Iran on Feb. 28, the region had settled into a dangerous twilight between ceasefire and conflict.

Washington and Tehran reached a truce on Apr. 8 that reduced the scale of fighting but not the risk of renewed escalation. American and Iranian forces continued trading blows. Iran and Israel continued to test each other. Gulf states remained exposed to retaliation. Commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway through which the region’s insecurity quickly becomes a global economic problem, remained hostage to dueling coercive measures. Therein lies the immediate value of the memorandum.

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