Talks resumed in Doha today with both sides claiming progress on a nuclear framework. But the gap between “largely agreed” and “signed” is where deals go to die — and this one is currently living in that gap.

On a day when most of Washington was at a barbecue, the most consequential diplomatic negotiation in years quietly resumed in Doha — with Iran and the United States edging toward a nuclear framework that neither side is quite ready to call a deal.

Senior Iranian negotiators arrived in Qatar on Monday as talks entered what officials on both sides describe as a critical drafting phase. The broad strokes are agreed. The fine print — the kind of sentence-level disagreements that have sunk agreements before — is not. And around the edges of the negotiating table, the forces that could still blow this up are very much present: a skeptical Israel, a fragmented Iranian leadership, and a US president whose public messaging this weekend swung so dramatically it left regional allies genuinely unsure what Washington actually wants.

WHAT THE DEAL LOOKS LIKE RIGHT NOW

1 Phase one: Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz. The US ends its naval blockade. Trade resumes.

2 Phase two: Iran freezes uranium enrichment for 10–20 years (duration still under negotiation) and exports approximately 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium — to the IAEA, not the US. Washington lifts sanctions and unfreezes Iranian assets. The more Iran concedes, the more money flows. One US official’s summary: “No dust, no dollars.”

3 Phase three: In-principle limits on Iran’s long-term nuclear capacity — structurally similar to the 2015 JCPOA that Trump himself killed in 2018.