Two-thirds of Americans want the conflict with Iran ended through a negotiated agreement as quickly as possible, and strong majorities back the core terms President Donald Trump put on paper at the Palace of Versailles, including Iran's nuclear pause and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Those are the top-line findings of a new Economist/YouGov survey of nearly 1,700 U.S. citizens, and the numbers cut across party lines in ways that should give the deal's loudest critics pause.
The poll lands days after Trump signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran during a dinner at Versailles, establishing a 60-day roadmap for negotiating a broader peace agreement. Nearly 90 percent of respondents said they have been following news about the proposed deal, an unusually high engagement figure that suggests the public is paying close attention, not passively absorbing headlines.
And what the public sees, it largely supports. Sixty-six percent of those surveyed said the United States should end the conflict through a deal as fast as possible. That sentiment crosses the aisle: 74 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans favor a negotiated settlement. Among Republicans who identify with the Make America Great Again movement, support climbs to 63 percent.
The specific provisions of the Memorandum of Understanding polled even better than the general concept of a deal. Sixty-nine percent of respondents support the provision calling for Iran to pause its nuclear weapon development and negotiate the disposition of its enriched uranium stockpile. An identical 69 percent back reopening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping on a toll-free basis for two months.
The MOU also calls for both nations to halt military action immediately, refrain from future attacks against one another, and recognize each other's territorial integrity and national sovereignty. Those terms amount to a framework, not a final treaty, a 60-day window to hammer out something more durable.
That distinction matters, because the deal's critics in Congress have spent weeks trying to constrain the president's authority to negotiate at all. Senate Republicans have blocked repeated Democratic attempts to curb Trump's Iran war powers, holding the line while the diplomatic track moved forward.
The Versailles signing itself was a layered diplomatic event. Just The News reported that the MOU was initially signed digitally by Vice President J.D. Vance and Iran's Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, witnessed by Trump, before Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian formally signed the document. The memorandum addresses Iran's nuclear program, ongoing fighting in Lebanon, sanctions relief, and plans for the release of frozen funds.
A White House official described the sequence plainly: "On Sunday, the MOU was signed digitally by Vice President Vance and Speaker Ghalibaf and witnessed by President Trump. Now, it has been signed by President Trump and President Pezeshkian."
The agreement did not materialize in a vacuum. Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif played a key mediating role, and the deal has been referred to as the "Islamabad MOU" in some diplomatic circles. Fox News reported that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen immediately as part of the agreement, and the United States agreed to lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports.
Sharif publicly praised both Trump and Iranian leadership for the breakthrough, stating that the "Islamabad MoU shall enter into force with immediate effect and, as a first step, the Islamic Republic of Iran will instantly reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States of America will immediately lift the naval blockade."
The reopening of the strait is no small thing. It is the world's most important oil chokepoint, and its closure during the conflict disrupted global energy markets. The poll's finding that 69 percent of Americans support the toll-free reopening reflects a public that understands the economic stakes.
Meanwhile, world leaders have lined up to praise the agreement, lending international credibility to the framework Trump negotiated.
The poll does not paint a picture of blind optimism. Americans support the deal's terms, but they harbor deep skepticism about Iran's long-term intentions. Two-thirds of respondents said they believe Iran will try to build nuclear weapons in the future regardless of any agreement. And 81 percent worry the talks will eventually fall apart and spark another conflict.
That combination, support for the deal now, doubt about Iran's compliance later, is not contradictory. It is the posture of a public that has watched decades of Middle East diplomacy produce mixed results at best. Americans want the fighting to stop. They just do not trust Tehran to keep its word.
The skepticism also helps explain a curious gap in the numbers. While 61 percent of Republicans favor a negotiated settlement in general, only 53 percent express support for this specific deal. Among Democrats, the gap is far wider: 74 percent want a negotiated end to the conflict, but just 21 percent say they support the deal Trump signed. The Economist/YouGov survey does not explain the discrepancy, but the partisan pattern is unmistakable. For many Democrats, the problem may not be the terms, it may be the man who signed them.
Trump himself has framed the deal as the product of years of strategic positioning. As RealClearPolitics reported, Trump told supporters: "This was years in the making. You know why? Because I was the one that killed General Soleimani. And if I didn't kill General Soleimani, we probably wouldn't be talking right now about this deal."
One of the poll's more striking findings involves Israel. About 58 percent of respondents said the United States should pursue a deal that benefits America even if the Israeli government opposes it. The survey framed the question around a hypothetical Israeli objection, and the answer was clear: a majority of Americans prioritize American interests.
That result does not signal hostility toward Israel. It signals something simpler, that voters do not want another war in the Middle East, and they are not willing to let a foreign government's objections override a deal they believe serves the United States. Trump's approach to Iran has been built on verification rather than trust, a deliberate contrast with the Obama-era JCPOA that critics on the right have long argued was dangerously naive.
Fox News host Jesse Watters summarized the deal's strategic logic in blunt terms: "They'll never have a nuclear weapon. The strait's open. The ayatollah's dead. Their military's whipped. And we did it in three months with no ground troops."
The MOU calls for Iran's enriched uranium stockpiles to be addressed under international supervision, and the deal includes a $300 billion Gulf-funded reconstruction investment, terms that have drawn scrutiny from the Senate Armed Services chair, who warned the fund dwarfs anything in the Obama-era agreement.
The 60-day roadmap clock is ticking. The Memorandum of Understanding is a framework, not a final agreement, and plenty can go wrong between now and the deadline. Iran's track record of compliance with international agreements is, to put it charitably, uneven. The 81 percent of Americans who worry the talks could collapse are not being paranoid, they are being realistic.
But the poll makes one thing difficult to argue: the American public wants this deal to work. Supermajorities support its key provisions. Nearly nine in ten are paying attention. And when asked whether the U.S. should push forward even over foreign objections, a clear majority says yes.
Congressional Democrats who spent weeks trying to strip the president's war powers and undermine his negotiating leverage now face a public that overwhelmingly supports the outcome those efforts would have prevented. Seventy-four percent of their own voters want a negotiated settlement. Only 21 percent back the specific deal. The gap between those numbers is the distance between principle and partisanship.
Americans are not naive about Iran. They expect Tehran to cheat, and they expect the talks to be hard. But they also know what another open-ended war in the Middle East costs, in blood, in treasure, and in the slow erosion of public trust in leaders who start conflicts they cannot finish. The poll says what common sense already told us: given a choice between more fighting and a deal that serves American interests, the country will take the deal every time.
The question was never whether Americans wanted peace. It was whether anyone in Washington had the nerve to negotiate it.