Last Friday morning, Axios published a scoop about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran. The administration, according to four sources, wants Iran to give up its stockpile of enriched uranium, of which it possesses about 2.2 tons in various underground facilities. In return, the United States would release to Iran $20 billion in frozen funds.
What?! It’s a staggering sum of money. And if all the details were accurate, it would represent an even more staggering negotiating win for Iran because Axios also reported that the Trump team opened their bidding at $6 billion; Iran wanted $27 billion. You don’t need to have gone to Wharton to know that 20 is a hell of a lot closer to 27 than it is to 6. The art of the deal indeed.
But here’s what makes the idea of this—and Trump denied the report, whatever that’s worth—particularly galling. As part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated between Iran, the United States, and five other nations under President Barack Obama, the United States agreed to release $1.7 billion in frozen Iranian funds. This was part of a cache of $100 billion or more that belongs to Iran but was frozen in international banks (most of them outside the United States) after the 1979 revolution and during subsequent impositions of sanctions. Fully $1.3 billion of the Obama-approved payment was interest.
You’ll recall how apoplectic with rage Trump and the entire right wing were about that payment. It was ransom! (Four American hostages were released.) It would finance terrorism across the region! Why, it was tantamount to treason! Sure enough, one writer for Front Page Magazine (David Horowitz’s outfit) argued: “In a sane political environment, Barack Obama would be tried for treason.”
Similar arguments, of course, issued from Donald Trump himself. He raised the issue of the $1.7 billion just recently, in fact. I guess that’s an improvement of sorts. He used to go around saying Obama gave Iran $150 billion in cash. That, as usual, was a blatant lie. The real story is that $150 billion is an estimate (and it’s on the very high end) of the amount of frozen assets Tehran potentially has access to from around the world. But Trump said it, again and again.
The $1.7 billion Obama gave to Iran under the JCPOA shouldn’t have been controversial in the first place. Yes, the payments were made in cash, in a series of installments, which looked a little fishy to a lot of people. U.S. officials maintained at the time that this was the preferred method of the relevant central banks. But cash or not, it was Iran’s money. Importantly, it came with many strings attached to ensure that Iran couldn’t just hand over bags of cash to Hezbollah and Hamas. But none of this stopped conservatives from painting Obama as a ransom-payer and a traitor.
And now, here comes Trump, if Axios is correct, offering Iran about 12 times that amount. If $1.7 billion was treason, then what’s $20 billion?
Actually, Robert Malley, who was Obama’s point man on Iran and helped negotiate the JCPOA, says that just as it was wrong for the right to make a stink over Obama’s payment, it would be wrong for the left to do it here. “Trump’s hypocrisy aside, I wouldn’t make that much of it,” Malley told me over the weekend via email. “First, it is Iran’s money, acquired from the sale of their oil. It has been frozen (along with roughly another 80 billion) due to U.S. sanctions. If it’s unfrozen, it would almost certainly still be closely monitored by the U.S. to ensure it could only be used for humanitarian transactions (food, medicine, etc). So, it’s not really a major concession.”
We should take Malley’s word for it here and be intellectually and ethically consistent. At the same time, I admit I find it a little hard to brush aside Trump’s hypocrisy—and not just his; the right’s in general on this point—quite so easily. This hypocrisy is at the heart of the right’s political project. If they want to criticize Obama over his payment, fine. But then they should do the same over Trump’s, if he makes one. That’s never going to happen, beyond at most a few critics. They’ll carry on, in the most fatuous and fawning way possible, about what a consummate dealmaker he is.
More broadly, as negotiations reportedly resume in Islamabad this week, the key question to keep in mind is this. What might Trump accomplish that hadn’t already been accomplished by the JCPOA? Let’s quickly review. Under that agreement—and again, remember, it was six countries and Iran at the negotiating table, not Barack Obama flying solo—Iran agreed to: cap enrichment levels at 3.67 percent for 15 years, far below the 90 percent needed for weapons; reduce its enriched uranium stockpile to 300 kilograms of 3.67-enriched uranium for 15 years; make changes at two key facilities that would prevent the production of nuclear weapons; and submit to an “extraordinary and robust” international monitoring regime.
By all objective accounts, the JCPOA was working. But when the United States under Donald Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018, Iran—guess what?—started producing higher levels of enrichment again. According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Iran’s breakout time—the time required to produce enough highly enriched fissile material for a nuclear weapon—has gone from more than a year under the JCPOA to “a couple of weeks” today. Well done, Mr. Art of the Deal.
I asked Malley: Assuming Trump gets everything he’s talking about getting, is there one thing he’s getting that wasn’t secured by the JCPOA? He wrote back:
“First, who knows what he’d get and who knows what he’s talking about?! We know nothing about constraints on Iran’s enrichment program in the future, about inspections, or about virtually anything else. Now, if Iran were to agree to suspend enrichment for a period of years, then, yes, that is something that we did not achieve under Obama.” (Under the Obama-era agreement, Iran vastly reduced enrichment but did not suspend it.)
“Would that marginal gain make the decision to rip up a functioning and effective deal and to thereby enable Iran to vastly expand its nuclear program, or the decision to wage a reckless and unlawful war, to plunge the world economy into chaos, to kill thousands, any more justifiable? Absolutely not.”
Malley didn’t mention the $50 billion or so the war has probably cost so far. So, let’s put that on the ledger as well. This all could have been avoided if Trump had just stayed in the JCPOA—which was even good enough for his buddy Putin. But it was Barack Obama’s brainchild, which meant it had to be torn up, simply because Donald Trump is such an insanely insecure and vindictive man. Tell that to the parents of those schoolgirls in Minab. I’m sure they’ll understand.
