Trump says he will hold American forces off new strikes on Iran, and the sentence that matters for oil names an open Strait of Hormuz as a parameter of a deal rather than a term that has been agreed

Nothing has been signed.

That is the load bearing fact underneath a Saturday evening social media post that stands to move the most important number in the oil market without having yet changed a single term of trade. President Donald Trump wrote that Mideast allies had reached the parameters of a deal to end the five month old war with Iran, and that he had agreed to hold American forces off new strikes. The Associated Press carried it from Washington and Cairo, bylined Aamer Madhani and Samy Magdy, and had the story updated at 12:09 a.m. Eastern on Sunday.

The wording is the story, and it is conditional at both ends.

The emerging deal, Trump wrote, "would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran's nuclear threat." His own commitment carries a matching condition: "Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL." Israel agreed to join the United States in the commitment to try to complete the agreement, he added.

Iran offered no immediate public reaction.

What is a parameter and what is a term

The distinction is not pedantry, because the strait is the entire financial content of the announcement. An open Hormuz is described here as something a deal would include. It is not described as something that has happened, and no step that would open it has been reported. The party that has been closing it has not spoken.

This desk could not open the post itself. The Truth Social endpoint returned a Cloudflare block, and two public mirrors held no matching text, so what is quoted above rests on two independent transcriptions, AP and CBS News, which match word for word including the capitalisation. That is a strong verification and it is still not the document, which is why it is being said out loud here rather than left for a reader to assume.

The June precedent, and a page that nearly published it again

The war began on 28 February, when the United States and Israel attacked Iran. AP notes that an earlier deal to stop the fighting, reached in mid-June, crumbled within weeks.

That precedent almost became this desk's error tonight. A search for the primary post returned an NBC News page whose headline announced that the United States and Iran had reached a framework deal and reopened the strait, and whose text described a completed agreement, a naval blockade being removed, a signing set for Friday in Switzerland and an Israeli defence minister speaking on Monday. The page carries one article schema block. It is dated 14 June. It is the deal that collapsed, sitting under a URL and a headline that read as current, and the only reasons it did not survive the check were a reference to Monday and a reference to Sunday inside a page that claimed to have last been modified on a Saturday evening. The rulebook says a fetched summary is a lead and the document is the verification. This is what that looks like when it happens to you.

What was going on in the hours either side

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke with Trump by phone on Saturday and raised concerns about the United States escalating the conflict, according to a person familiar with the discussion. A White House official confirmed the leaders spoke and offered no detail. The call came before the announcement.

The announcement also arrived a day after Trump had suggested the United States was close to resuming heavy strikes to force Tehran to negotiate, and on the same Saturday the State Department issued new security alerts urging Americans in the region to prepare for flight cancellations, temporary airspace closures and other disruption, across Bahrain, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those alerts were issued as the deal was being announced, and they have not been withdrawn.

The next thing that will actually tell you something

Crude reopens on Sunday evening into a market that closed on Friday knowing none of this, and it will be pricing a claim about parameters made by one party and so far uncorroborated by the other.

Two developments would carry more information than any further post. The first is an Iranian statement, because the strait is closed by Iranian action and no American undertaking reopens it. The second is a resumption of tanker traffic, which is observable, dated and hard to spin.

Until one of those happens, the position on the water is Friday's position.