Good News! The M.O.U. Has Held Longer Than the Reflecting Pool Sealant

Duane Patterson 9:20 AM | June 22, 2026
X/The White House

To be fair, the Reflecting Pool sealer had help. It didn't peel on its own accord. It was cut out in chunks. 

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If we now have to worry about Trump-hating Olympians causing wanton vandalism on national landmarks, I sure hope someone has eyes on Megan Rapinoe. 

Speaking of keeping one's eye on things, following the progress of the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and the rump regime claiming to represent the Islamic Republic of Iran has been harder to do than keeping up with a street magician running a shell game. 

The 14-paragraph document was signed on Sunday, June 15th, and was allegedly in force, but not really in force until it was signed again four days later while Donald Trump dined in Versailles. Masoud Pezeshkian on behalf of the Iranian regime signed it about an hour later. Traffic picked up in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend. On Saturday, 32 ships traversed the 21-mile-wide stretch of international waterway without being harassed by Iranian interference or mines. 

The markets liked what they saw. All three stock indexes were poised Friday night in pre-market trading to open Monday up by a significant amount, buoyed by the prospects of talks in Switzerland and oil finally moving through the Strait, even if only one-third of pre-war levels. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who has access to much better data than available open source intel, said the traffic was even higher while appearing on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream. 

Included in that traffic through the Strait were ships containing around 36 million barrels of Iranian crude outbound for the first time in a long time since President Trump's Operation Economic Fury included a naval blockade of any Iranian ports. So all's well, right? Not exactly.

Hezbollah, the Iranian terror proxy in Lebanon, apparently did not get the memo about the M.O.U. being in force, and that there was to be a ceasefire in that region with Israel as part of the deal, and launched several rockets into Northern Israel. Five Israeli Defense Force soldiers were killed in the process. They would have launched more from those locations except for the withering response from Israel that destroyed up to a 150 different suspected Hezbollah sites. 

Iran was livid - not at Hezbollah, mind you, who actually broke the terms of the M.O.U., but at Israel for responding. They threatened to walk away from negotiations on the final deal promised by the M.O.U. and close up the Strait of Hormuz once again. 

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Okay, two pretty big sticking points right away - Iran allegedly walking away from the negotiating table, and putting out a communique that they will magically close the Strait with the power of their (*checks notes*, looking for what they can threaten the Strait with after the U.S. showed it can impose its will with Project Freedom). 

Regardless of their ability to affect shipping lanes through the Strait kinetically, their words had the desired goal. On Sunday, crossings throttled back down to 15, or less than half of what moved the day before. Pre-market trading tumbled, and oil began to rise again. And Vice-President J.D. Vance, playing the role of good cop to Donald Trump's bad cop, was about to be left at the altar in Lake Lucerne. Enter the bad cop. 

From Fox News' Trey Yingst:

I know the conventional wisdom is that with the midterms coming in a few months, President Trump doesn't have the stomach to renew kinetic action against Iran, and the Iranians know it. But he also does not like getting pushed around, and seems to be quickly running out of patience with the Tehran two-step. 

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan Sunday, and recounted several hours he spent with the President about how he was thinking vis-a-vis Iran. 

Senator Graham will always take the hawk's view about what to do with Iran, any chance he gets. But is he representing the feelings of the President accurately? It sure seems so. 

The Iranian regime, whatever remains of them, being the fragile, delicate flowers they are, took umbrage at the threats return-volleyed to them by the American president. 

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Did Iran follow through with their threat and walk away from the table? Of course, not. There's way too much money at stake for them to bail. 

Iran's premise for walking away was the hammering Hezbollah was taking from the Israeli Defense Forces. After Israel's response, the ceasefire, however you define it, is at least theoretically back in place. 

What caused the barrage to stop? Donald Trump. 

The interesting dynamic here is that regarding Iran, Trump is playing the bad cop to J.D. Vance's good cop. With Israel, the roles appear to be reversed. Vance's rhetoric has been way too Tucker Carlsonesque for my liking in contrast to President Trump. The President can and reportedly has gotten angry at attacks launched by Bibi Netanyahu into Southern Lebanon at particularly sensitive times during the M.O.U. negotiations, but Trump has consistently provided the press with comments that in the end, he supports Israel's right to defend itself against terror threats. Notice that in this tweet, Donald Trump isn't telling Bibi to knock it off. He's telling Iran to tell their proxies to knock it off, or he'll take it out on Iran, not Hezbollah. 

How did the regime respond to another threat in the same weekend by the President? Talks are off...again. 

So were talks off again? Did Iran walk away from the negotiating table? Nah. 

The yellow brick road, if you will, on the path that leads to Oz, or Tehran rejoining the community of nations as a non-nuke-seeking state, begins by creating a deconfliction zone that keeps Hezbollah at bay from the Israelis. 

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Here's the rub. Israeli Defense Forces are sitting right in the middle of this would-be deconfliction zone. Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Iran don't like it one little bit, Donald Trump has not objected to Israel holding that ground, for now, and Israel isn't about ready to give it up. 

Back in 2006, a United Nations resolution handed down an edict that Hezbollah was forbidden to operate south of the Litani River in Southern Lebanon. Israel's northern border is about 20 miles south of the Litani, and for the last couple of decades, whenever rockets have been launched, many of them have been from sites south of the river in clear violation of the U.N. resolution. Until now, nothing has been done about it. 

While the U.S. has been dealing with Iran, Netanyahu and the IDF not only made a run for the border, but advanced north of the Litani on May 5th. No one publicly stated, nor was it predicted, that they would stay for any extended period of time, because Lebanon would simply not accept losing one-fifth of their land mass to Israel's incursion, regardless of the reason. The concept of redrawing borders permanently was not a topic of conversation at either of the peace talks between Israel and Lebanon sponsored by Marco Rubio's State Department. It's just understood that permanent occupation or new borders is a non-starter. 

Except...

They're not planning on retreating below the Litani anytime soon. And in fact, they've pushed well north of the Litani, taking over Beaufort Castle, a former Hezbollah stronghold that sits strategically on high ground overlooking Northern Israel, almost to the Zahrani River. 

And before anyone in Lake Lucerne develops ideas of forcing Israeli forces back south, Israel presented receipts of years' worth of U.N. violations by Hezbollah in the form of an underground drone factory buried below a hilltop in Majdal Zoun, Lebanon.

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Buried beneath a hilltop village in southern Lebanon, just kilometers from the Israeli border, the Hezbollah terror group built an underground drone “airbase” from which it launched Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles at Israel. 

The subterranean facility, guarded by massive steel blast doors, was built in the past decade with direct Iranian assistance, including planning and funding, Israeli military officials told The Times of Israel during an organized media tour of the site last week. 

Journalists were brought into Lebanon at dusk, so that the visit to the tunnel would take place under the cover of darkness — an attempt by the military to mitigate the possibility of Hezbollah attacks on members of the press.

This hilltop is just under two miles from Israel's northern border, well south of the Litani River. Israel has every right not to get itself boxed out of ending the terror threat to their north by abiding by an agreement to which they're not a party. So far, Trump has given Israel latitude to get on with their business of rooting out Hezbollah pockets, but to get it done in a hurry. What the proposed deconfliction zone looks like remains to be seen, but anything flying south from Lebanon with explosives on it, and any responses to it, according to Trump, will be laid at the feet of the Iranians. They can throw as many tizzies as they desire, but if they do indeed need someone to show them the money eventually in a final peace deal, they're going to have to throttle their proxies first. 

With all that uncertainty in literally one weekend, you'd think the markets would be in for a bullish Monday, right? 

Markets are still poised to open down, but have recovered a lot of their losses over the weekend with news that in spite of the rhetorical warfare, both sides seem to be progressing to the next step, and oil will remain moving unfettered. 

And despite the chaos, Donald Trump continues piling up wins internationally that always get glossed over, yet deserve attention. Take the impact on China from Trump's move on Iran. 

Sure, China has oil reserves that can help them ride out supply chain problems like losing Venezuela, and especially Iran for the last few months. They've had to come to Texas to buy oil - something they were not willing to do at all before the war went kinetic and the blockade started. And regardless of their internal reserves, I don't care what country you are. Those drops in oil imports are numbers that will put a hitch in your giddy-up if you've got expansionist plans. 

And speaking of China's expansionist plans, did you check out what happened in Colombia over the weekend? Another socialist government has fallen. 

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Is this a big deal? Immeasurably. Why? The U.S., even under the socialist Gustavo Petro government, is Colombia's largest trading partner. Guess who is number two with a bullet, meaning rising fast? China, on the back of a ton of Belt and Road Initiative money. The incoming Espriella administration is poised to lean more into Washington and away from Beijing. It's expected that Colombia will begin to unwind a lot of its Belt and Road entanglements, and that's a very good thing for a President whose focus for this term is restoring U.S. dominance and alliances in the Western Hemisphere. 

Why do I give credit to Trump for how Colombia voted? Cause and effect. Just in the time since Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio cut off USAID funding to third-world countries, here's a list of elections in Latin America that have taken place and the results.

To put it another way,

Don't let the colors fool you. In the U.S., red usually means Republican or right, and blue used to represent Democrats or the left. The colors are reversed in this map, but you can see the trend is clearly in the United States' best interest. 

Or is it? You might be one of those poor souls out there who are against Trump no matter what he does. You might believe that by lifting the World Cup, as countless world leaders from host countries have done in the past, the President has committed a sin against soccer. (Yes, there are people outraged over Trump touching the cup with his bare hands.) 

You may be rooting for the soccer team from Iran, the world's leading state sponsor of terror, solely because Donald Trump is their chief antagonist. 

Or you may be so full of hatred of this President that you actually come out on the side of Team Algae and protest National Guardsmen standing watch around the Reflecting Pool so deluded former Olympians don't swan dive in and carve out blue sealant. 

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Despite the number of human obstacles in Donald Trump's way, the number of accomplishments and achievements that will benefit this country for decades is almost too numerous to count. I'm still not sold entirely on the M.O.U. or whatever comes out in the final peace plan, if indeed we get that far, until I learn a lot more about the "gentlemen's agreement" details to which the President has intimated were part of the negotiations. But I'm willing to give our team latitude based on past performance. 

I'm certainly not ready to join Team Algae, which has to be the terminal point of where all Trump Derangement Syndrome roads lead. 

We've come so far as a country in the last couple of weeks alone converting Freddy, the German soccer fan, about American exceptionalism. You'd hate to see all those gains given away in one afternoon if Freddy were to run across a protest group nuttier than a Team Algae rally.

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