Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a planned U.S.-Iran memorandum was still on track for a Sunday signing, even as Israeli strikes hit Beirut’s southern suburbs and rockets were fired into northern Israel. Asked on Face the Nation whether the fighting would throw off the timetable, he said, “From all I know, we are on track.”
Hegseth's answer came in a televised interview with Margaret Brennan on June 14, 2026, after Brennan said the Israeli Defense Force had carried out strikes in Lebanon aimed at Hezbollah leadership and that the potential truce included a vague reference to ending the fighting there. She pressed him on whether the attack would disrupt the signing that day and the planned ceremony two days later. He said it would not. “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” he said, adding that logistics would determine how the signing happened.
He also argued that the broader deal was close. “We’re on the verge of a deal,” he said, while insisting, “I don’t expect that to disrupt.” In his account, Iran had to push Hezbollah to stop firing, because the group was still launching rockets into northern Israel and Israel’s response was, in his words, “very measured.”
The exchange mattered because the interview tied a regional escalation in Lebanon to the timing of a separate diplomatic track involving the United States and Iran. The transcript gave no indication that the confrontation in Beirut’s southern suburbs had changed the calendar, only that the administration still viewed Sunday as the target date.
Hegseth also sketched the contours of the proposed agreement in unusually blunt terms. He said the deal was performance-based, with no money released to Iran until it performed, and said nuclear material would be destroyed and removed. “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, never. Full stop,” he said. He added that the nuclear program would be dismantled and contrasted the proposal with the JCPOA, which he called “a path to a bomb,” while saying the new deal would be “a wall to a bomb.”
He said the United States would keep the military posture it needed to maintain, underscoring that the talks were unfolding alongside active fighting rather than in its absence. The open question is not whether Hegseth wanted the signing to go ahead. It is whether the Sunday memorandum was actually completed, and what final terms were put in writing if it was.
