Stack the Week

Welcome everyone to the Stack the Week experiment for June 15 through June 19. It is available here in text and audio and available in your podcast player. Thank you for those who have reviewed it on Apple Podcasts.

Thank you to Annie Cohen and Laura Doan for help preparing this delicious offering.

The MOU with not much U, a G-7 that crosses a low bar, the UK bans social media for growing brains and one of its mayors may get an upgrade, Growing brains on SNAP have it tougher, Claude sounds French but being American is its problem. In France the high schoolers earn their berets and cigarettes, they must have given a mouse a cookie in Australia, and a heavy week of mourning for trees.

Let’s take it day by day.

Monday, June 15th

Memorandum of Misunderstanding

For what purpose did this war in Iran take place? One of the goals of this here podcast has been to try to keep that question at the center of what we do, both with respect to the Iran war, but also in general. Trying to find the balance between keeping you updated on the latest developments while also keeping in mind the basic question: What is the point of this enterprise we are delivering you the latest news on?

Don’t let the swarm of daily developments distract our focus from the key question.

Events on Monday brought that question back to the center– that is, why this war had started– as the world evaluated the Sunday announcement by the president that a deal had been reached with Iran to end the war.

What kind of deal was a secret on Sunday and Monday. But as the sun went down Monday night a few things were clear:

The first was that the stated goals at the start of the war– regime change in Iran, unconditional surrender, verifiable destruction and ending of Iran’s nuclear program had all not happened. Sure, The regime had changed in the sense that the previous members of it were all dead, but the current members share the same ideological bent, and so for all practical reasons there has been no regime change.

As to the details:

The Strait of Hormuz will open—a critical waterway that only got a kink in it once the war started— and Iran will profit from oil sales in exchange for promising not to develop nuclear weapons. This core commitment echoes the famous line from the preamble of the 2015 JCPOA that President Trump cancelled in 2018. As Bloomberg noted of the new interim framework: “It seems the US president’s negotiators have solved only the problems Trump himself has created.”

‘Memorandum of misunderstanding.’ That’s what Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called it. Because on some key details, the two sides said were saying different things. Take the situation in Lebanon. Iranian state media announced that the deal secureds a permanent ceasefire on all fronts, interpreting the agreement as a U.S. obligation to force Israeli troops out of Lebanon and end the bombing. But the view from Washington and Jerusalem wasis entirely different: the U.S. frameds the deal as a mechanism to neutralize Iran’s regional proxy warfare, while Israeli officials hadve already publicly declared that Trump’s agreement doesn’t bind them and their troops aren’t leaving Lebanon.

Then there is the issue of transit. The Trump administration touted a completely open, toll-free international waterway, but Tehran told its domestic audience that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened exclusively “under Iranian arrangements.”

As Axios first reported, intercepted communications show Iranian officials telling one another they have zero intention of agreeing to a final deal on U.S. terms or allowing the physical removal of their enriched uranium stockpile. Instead, Tehran’s private strategy is to treat the 60-day interim window as a mechanism to immediately break the U.S. naval blockade and pocket early economic lifelines—like legalized oil exports—while dragging out technical talks and resisting any enforcement that actually reduces their nuclear capabilities.

During Operation Epic Fury, the name the administration gave to the operation while it was in its heavy bombing phase, Trump administration officials and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent maintained that Iran would receive no sanctions relief or access to its estimated $100 billion in frozen foreign assets prior to completing verified nuclear concessions. Bessent explicitly stated that paying transit tolls to Tehran was illegal and warned that any damages inflicted on Gulf allies would be compensated using funds confiscated from Iranian accounts.

Hot talk.

Under the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) the U.S. granted immediate sanctions waivers for Iranian oil and fuel sales—alongside necessary banking, insurance, and transport services.

$100 billion in frozen assets will be available to Iran if they play ball during the 60 day negotiations.

Additionally, the text of the MOU includes a framework for a $300 billion international reconstruction and economic development fund for Iran. This erupted into a spat over whether the United States was paying off Iran. The administration said no, the performance-based money would be funded by the Gulf Coast Coalition rather than U.S. investment.

Two notes: The concern with paying off Iran has always been that they will use the money to just rebuild their capabilities and these structured payments look an awful lot like the kinds of payments that were once savaged by Trump and others when the Obama administration was also releasing Iranian money frozen by sanctions.

Judging by the details of the accord Israel who was in on the take off of this war– some would say Israel was flying the plane.-- was not there for the landing. As of Monday, Israel had neither been a party to the talks or seen a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding. That’s in part because it deals with almost none of Israel’s concerns.

G-7: a fragile balance

President Trump landed in France Monday for a summit America’s allies had spent months engineering around him.

The Group of Seven met this year in Évian-les-Bains, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, with a host who pushed the summit back a day — France originally scheduled it for June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday — and who rescinded an invitation to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa after administration aides warned Trump would boycott the summit if Ramaphosa attended. The two countries had been at war over South Africa’s genocide suit against Israel at the International Court of Justice and a land reform law Trump called persecution of white Afrikaners. France denied acting under U.S. pressure. And Macron also arranged for Trump a private dinner at Versailles — among the gilded halls built for Louis XIV — a bauble to keep the American president from leaving early.

The G-7 — a gathering of the world’s seven advanced economies — was built in 1975 precisely to limit this kind of diplomatic rushing around. French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing wanted a small, informal room where the leaders of the major democracies could coordinate without the carbuncular bureaucracy in the way.

That architecture assumes the participants want the same basic thing, which was easier to assume after the Second World War.

European leaders have largely concluded they can no longer count on that with the United States. After the tariff wars, lukewarm support for Ukrainian democracy, footsie with Russia and hostility toward NATO, the Greenland episode — at one point some European governments believed Trump was preparing to send troops to seize the island from Denmark — and the U.S. strike on Iran without allied consultation. You can see why the calculation has shifted.

European leaders are now trying to ride two horses: building a structure that functions without the U.S. and not irritating Trump.

None of the leaders gathered in Évian want an open rupture with Washington. The U.S. still provides the nuclear umbrella, the intelligence architecture, and most of NATO’s logistical backbone. Oh and its markets, access to capitol, customers and more are part of the global economy.

A summit like the G-7 is always a collision between the calendar and the crisis — between the long-range problems that demand collective attention and the immediate emergency that actually has everyone’s focus. This one was no different. The formal agenda that France had carefully assembled — AI cooperation; critical minerals, the lithium, cobalt, and rare earths that China controls and the West needs for defense hardware, semiconductors, and batteries; and development partnerships, the loans and infrastructure financing meant to counter China’s influence in the Global South — was pushed to the margins by the Iran war’s aftershocks. Energy prices are elevated. Supply chains are rattled.

DOJ Newsom snoop

In July 2019, Donald Trump pressed the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into Joe Biden — who was likely to be his 2020 opponent — and find proof that Biden had done something– anything– illegal. The House impeached Trump for using his office for personal reasons and warping the obligations of national security. The Senate acquitted him, 52 to 48, with Mitt Romney the only Republican voting to convict.

Two-term California Governor Gavin Newsom claimed Trump was running the same play on him. Newsom, who is widely believed to be running for president, announced Monday that the Trump Justice Department is investigating him and his wife.

Federal agents have knocked on the doors of friends and former associates and subpoenaed documents spanning years, according to the governor’s office. Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom,