Ben Rhodes
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
and this is important because I'm counting me as skeptical that this is going to be part of anything Trump negotiates.
There was monitoring of uranium mines.
Where do they mine the uranium?
There was monitoring of uranium mills.
So how do they convert it into something that can be put in a centrifuge?
So essentially the entire supply chain
of the Iranian nuclear program, from when you take uranium out of the ground to when you ship that stockpile out of the country, was under monitoring and verification.
And this is what's really important, is that having people on the ground, having cameras, having the centrifuges that they put in storage were under lock and seal.
So if they opened the crate, people could see that.
So it was an effort to essentially put a blanket over the nuclear program and limitations on it.
In response, they got sanctions relief.
They got basically their assets unfrozen.
So the oil that they were selling in the national market, they couldn't access the resources they were getting for that.
So people were buying oil, but then it was getting tied up in U.S.
sanctions.
That got unfrozen.
Now, the criticisms, I'm going to be fair to the criticisms of the deal.
It did not deal with the ballistic missile program.
It did not deal with support for proxies.
The Iranians were not negotiating that with us.