President Donald Trump has made a few guarantees about a deal to end the war he started with Iran.
They frequently include two main points:
1. It will ensure that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon
2. Trump’s deal will be better than President Barack Obama’s
Trump keeps coming back to that that second point.
Here he is in a post on his social media platform Sunday:
“The Obuma Deal was a road to a Nuclear weapon for Iran, cash and all, one of the worst and dumbest (hence Dumocrats!) Deals ever made by the U.S. Our Deal is a WALL against Iran ever having a Nuclear weapon, the complete opposite of Obuma.”
The misspellings of Obama’s name and the Democratic Party appear to be intentional digs by Trump. And the deal he’s referring to — technically called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA — was negotiated and signed in July of 2015 by Iran with the US, the European Union, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and Germany.
Asked Monday when the public might see text of his agreement with Iran, which has not yet been released, Trump went straight back to Obama.
“It’s not like the Obama document, which was just a terrible document,” Trump said, sitting alongside French President Emmanuel Macron during a trip to France. “This is a very powerful document, and I want it to be released. So probably pretty soon.”
What does Obama say?
Obama has also been asked in recent weeks to compare his own Iran efforts with Trump’s. The prediction from Obama is that whatever Trump achieves will be very similar to the JCPOA, which Trump tore up in his first term.
“It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place,” Obama told ABC’s Robin Roberts in an interview that aired Monday.
Obama used that comparison to criticize Trump’s bombastic foreign policy and said the same ends could have been accomplished through diplomacy.
“The notion that we can just bully our way or bomb our way to solutions may sometimes seem appealing, but the fact of the matter is, is that taking the time to explore diplomacy and exhaust the possibilities of coming up with deals that don’t solve 100% of the problem, but solve 80, 90% of the problem, while avoiding the necessity of going to war,” Obama said. “You’d think we would have learned that lesson by now, but it seems like every so often we have to relearn that lesson again.”
It is currently impossible to compare the two
The agreement announced Sunday has not yet been publicly released, so it is impossible to say how exactly it stacks up against the JCPOA. One indicator is that the JCPOA was a detailed, 18-page agreement – read it here. Trump’s agreement, a “memorandum of understanding,” is “about a page and a half,” Vice President JD Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday.
More importantly, the new MOU is not a long-term nuclear deal, but rather an agreement to halt the war and negotiate for 60 days. A longer-term agreement could result from those negotiations, but is not guaranteed.
And finally, it’s hard to draw comparisons since the Obama JCPOA — which was actually a deal between Iran and a large group of countries including the US — is from a much different time.
A lot has happened in the last decade
Back in 2015, Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program. International monitors verified that Iran was complying and Iran was able to tap its oil wealth.
Trump withdrew the US from the JCPOA in 2018. Iran subsequently also withdrew from the agreement and then kickstarted its enrichment of uranium.
So any part of a successful Trump deal would necessarily include either the downgrading of uranium Iran enriched after the JCPOA’s demise or the taking of that uranium out of Iran. Trump has talked about the need to remove the “nuclear dust.”
Iran has new leverage in the Strait of Hormuz
Iran has gained a new bargaining chip, which is tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Choking the world’s oil supply was not part of negotiations between Iran and signatories of the JCPOA.
What will the 60-day MOU do?
Rather than a multilateral international and long-term agreement like the one Obama entered into, the new agreement would stop hostilities between the countries and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The US will reportedly stop its blockade of Iranian ports, and Iran will allow shipping traffic through the strait.
The deal according to Vance
Vance, who has taken a lead role for the US on reaching the deal with Iran and will apparently be the US official on hand to sign it in Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday, gave more details on the Iran deal during an interview on CNBC Monday.
He said there would be a two-step process by which the US would verify that Iran had abandoned its nuclear program in exchange for being allowed to tap into its oil wealth and join the world economy.
“That’s fundamentally the two-step process, the choice the Iranians have to make,” Vance said. “Do they want access to the world economy? If so, they’re going to have to give up the long-term nuclear ambition.”
He added that the US has already largely destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Lifting sanctions would allow Iran to access billions
The US end of that agreement is to allow Iran access to money, which will be sort of awkward since Trump frequently complains – and misstates facts – about the truth that the Obama-era deal gave lifted some sanctions on Iran, giving the country access to billions of dollars in exchange for limiting its nuclear program.
A Trump deal would have to do the same, enticing Iran to limit or abandon its nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions. Iranian leaders have said they could get access to $24 billion during the 60-day negotiating period the interim deal would kick off.
Vance denied that figure is accurate during an interview with CBS News on Sunday, but he acknowledged that a larger agreement could mean many more billions for the regime. There appears to be some disagreement between Iranian and US officials over the unfrozen assets. In any event, Iran wants to unlock billions of dollars.
“What we have said is that we’re willing to talk about unfreezing assets, but a much, much bigger deal is unsanctioning their economy — so long as they make the long-term commitments on the nuclear program,” Vance said.
A deal to keep talking
But again, any comparisons are premature since the current agreement is an agreement to talk for another 60 days.
“It doesn’t actually resolve anything,” said Kurt Volker, the former US ambassador to NATO, during an appearance Monday on CNN. “It’s a temporary memorandum of understanding to set the stage for new negotiations.”
Volker made predictions for the coming negotiations.
“Iran is going to very strenuously try to cling to a nuclear enrichment program, to storage of enriched uranium,” he said, adding, “And they want to assert some kind of control over the Strait of Hormuz going forward.”
There are ways to improve upon the JCPOA, Volker said, including better limits on Iran’s right to enrich uranium and a better system by which the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, verifies that Iran is living up to its commitments not to pursue a nuclear weapon.
Those are details to watch, Volker said.
“But I suspect that we’re nowhere near there. All we’re hearing right now is that they’re committing not to have a nuclear weapon, which is what they’ve said all along. So I’m not sure that we’ve seen much (that’s) different yet,” he said.
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