The ledger must be opened

According to CNBC, Washington and Tehran announced a Memorandum of Understanding over the weekend, while President Trump — meeting allies at the G7 summit — flatly denied that the United States would put "any money" into Iran. The BBC adds, through Vice President Vance, that the agreement runs to roughly "a page and a half" and is "very general," with many details still to be worked out. I will take those reports as my dossier. What follows is inference, not recollection.

A page and a half. Gentlemen, the Report on Public Credit ran to tens of thousands of words, because the obligations of a sovereign — even a young and struggling one — are serious enough to deserve that gravity. An agreement between the world's largest economy and a long-sanctioned rival state that fits on one and a half pages is either the preamble to a longer instrument or a promise that no one fully intends to keep. Neither outcome flatters the nation that signs it.

The president's denial that "any money" will enter Iran is worth examining on its commercial face. Sanctions relief is money. The right to sell oil on open markets is money. Access to frozen assets is money. I do not say these things are forbidden or unwise — commerce between nations, when it can be had on decent terms, tends to enlarge prosperity on both sides, and I have always believed in commercial vigor over commercial isolation. But the public and the Congress deserve a full accounting of what relief has been granted, to whom, and under what conditions. That is not partisanship; it is elementary public credit doctrine.

My deeper concern is the form, not the content. A Memorandum of Understanding is not a treaty. It does not bind the Senate. It does not, in the ordinary course, bind the next administration. Nations that deal in vague instruments purchase cheap agreements at the cost of durable ones. The credit of the United States in foreign affairs rests on the same foundation as its credit in the bond markets: the reasonable expectation that what is promised will be performed, and that the terms are clear enough to hold in court — or, at minimum, in the court of international opinion. Vagueness is the enemy of that expectation.

I will close on a recommendation, as I always do. The administration should publish the full text of whatever has been agreed — not a characterization of it, not a spokesman's gloss, but the document itself. Congress should demand it under its constitutional role in foreign commerce and treaty affairs. If the terms are genuinely favorable to American interests and to the stability of the region, sunlight will vindicate them. If they are not, then the public credit of this republic — its word abroad — is exactly the thing at stake, and the American people are owed the truth of what their government has signed.