Ben Rhodes

Think of it this way.

Iran is more than willing to concede things that they can reaccumulate, right?

And this is something that we went through in negotiations with them.

So if they ship the stockpile out, they can at some point reaccumulate a stockpile, obviously.

I assume that what you'll get is they'll ship that stockpile out.

They'll commit to not enrich uranium or to a very limited amount of enrichment for some duration of time.

I think that the Iranians, by the way, think that these years are totally fungible because they've seen that the United States doesn't keep deals.

So fine, they can promise five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.

They know that these timelines are fairly artificial.

And so I think they'll commit to some limitations on enrichment and shipping the stockpile out and having the Strait of Hormuz open.

And what they will want in return is as much money as they can get from unfrozen assets

And ideally, what they'd want is sanctions relief, like the ability to actually normalize their economy, sell oil on the open market, or to tax the Strait of Hormuz and get a fee from those shipping.

They want revenue, essentially.

So they'll want revenue exchange for limitation.

The other thing I'd say is that the JCPOA

had the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council, right?

So the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and the EU were all part of the deal with Iran, with the IEA.

So you had this kind of international legitimacy around the deal.

You had the inspections mechanism.

You had the people that were serving as essentially guarantors.