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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Tammy Shipley believed someone was out to hurt her. I thought someone was after me and I wanted to just be safe. She's put under 24-hour surveillance. I tried to get in contact multiple times. And then something strange happens. She just drank and drank and had something like 20 litres of pure water.
It's an understanding, an agreement before a deal, and it hasn't been signed yet. But this is the closest Donald Trump has come to ending the Iran war, which in the President's words will see the oil flowing again through the Strait of Hormuz. Today, international relations expert Rajan Menon on whether the ceasefire will halt. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Rajan, Donald Trump, he turned 80 and he got a ceasefire agreement on the same day.
Yes, it was touch and go for a while, Sam, because the Iranians wouldn't say anything and they raised some doubts about whether it would be signed. It's not clear whether that was just to put pressure on Trump to make him look bad or, and there's some indication of this, that there are divisions within Iran itself. over the agreement because some of the hardliners think it gives away too much.
But yes, they have said now that they've reached an agreement.
Well, the vice president, JD Vance, speaking on Fox News, he said the agreement will transform the Middle East for decades to come.
If the Iranians comply with his deal, it is going to fundamentally transform the Middle East for the next 50 years. It's going to end the war. It's going to make the Middle East more investable. It's going to mean a lot of prosperity, lower energy prices for the American people.
But as you point out, this is a memorandum of understanding. So it's an agreement before an actual deal, right?
Correct. And I have no idea what Vance means.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of the new Iran deal proposed by Trump?
I mean, the White House spin machine is in full gear now. I have no idea what Vance means by transforming the Middle East for years to come because before the war started, the Strait of Hormuz was open and free for shipping. And now Trump has announced, well, I am pleased to authorize the opening of the Straits of Hormuz. He can't authorize anything. It's because the Iranians
have agreed to allow shipping through, but they have made it clear, and Trump doesn't mention this, that it will be under the shared authority of Oman, which is on the other side of the Gulf, and Iran. There's some talk of whatever they call it, fee, toll, or what have you. There'll be some fee levied on ships that go in and out.
And that was a degree of control that they never had before and never really thought they would have.
So you think there will be a toll because Donald Trump, he says there won't be a toll.
He says many things which the Iranians then contradict promptly. But they have the advantage of geography and they have the advantage of control. It ends the war. That's a good thing. But there is another big sticking point, namely, the Iranians have set a ceasefire on all fronts.
The Iranians want the ceasefire to extend to Lebanon, but the red line is that Beirut, the capital, should not be hit. And today, the Israelis hit a southern suburb called Dahiya, which is a Shiite neighborhood and a kind of bastion of Hezbollah. So if that continues, this could come unstuck.
Trump somehow managed, I think, to talk the Iranians down from what they were about to do, which was to engage in a retaliation against Israel. That could have spun out of control. And then Trump would have had two choices, either to abandon Israel to its own fate, which no president has done in a very long time, or to jump in and help them and have the ceasefire
blow up in his face because the Iranians wouldn't have signed it then.
Donald Trump is clearly increasingly frustrated with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, isn't he? He's had some very unkind words, in fact, to say about him.
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Chapter 3: What concessions did the U.S. make to Iran for the ceasefire?
The asset parts, I've heard different numbers, $12 billion, $29 billion, whatever it is, but there is certainly going to be a release of assets, Iran has made it absolutely clear. Now the White House is trying to massage this and saying, well, Iran is not being given any money and so on and so forth.
But the fact of the matter is that Iranian assets frozen by the United States are going to be handed over to Iran. Now that's in my book, giving somebody money. And then the sanctions are going to be lifted, but not all at once on a phased basis. Now, the procedure for doing that, how quickly and at what pace and over what period of time has to be worked out, right?
I should just add one quick thing about phase one. What's very interesting about phase one is the Israelis have insisted that the Iranians need to make a commitment on two issues. One is to reduce the number and range of the ballistic missiles. And secondly, to stop supporting their partners in the region, the Houthis in Yemen, but especially Hezbollah.
The Iranians have made no commitment to do that as part of phase one. Then you have phase two, which is, of course, the nuclear part.
Why don't we then, Rajan, look at Iran's nuclear ambition? What do we know about what Tehran and the Iranian regime, of course, have agreed to when it comes to any ambition to produce a nuclear weapon?
Right. That's not as big a deal because Iran has maintained this verbally ever since the 2015 JCPOA agreement that Obama signed with Iran. If you read the preamble, it says Iran will for all time, I'm paraphrasing here, renounce the development of nuclear weapons, any kind of nuclear ambition. So this is not some big thing that's been achieved, right?
The real problem is Iran has accumulated, since the JCPOA was torn apart by President Trump, about close to 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%. That's within a hair of weapons-grade uranium, which is 90% or more, right? So there's the question of what will happen to that. Now, Trump has said over and over again that, well, this will be removed from Iran.
The new supreme leader, Majdaba Khamenei, has said that is not going to be allowed. Now, if you don't remove it, another possibility is something called downblending, where you take uranium of 90 or 60 percent, and you mix that uranium with either natural uranium or depleted uranium, thereby bringing it down to about 5 percent, then the verification has to be worked out.
How will the United States and the rest of the world know that, in fact, Iran is not amassing more weapons-grade uranium. All of these technical details, when it came to JCPOA, took years to work out.
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Chapter 4: How might the ceasefire impact the Middle East's geopolitical landscape?
We know the Israelis are not happy with the deal.
The Israelis are in a very tight spot. On the one hand, Netanyahu is under extraordinary pressure not to buckle to the Americans. But on the other hand, Hezbollah remains a problem militarily. Hezbollah is not going to go anywhere. Hezbollah, by the way, didn't exist until 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon. It's important to to understand. It is a kind of resistance movement.
Does it engage in terrorism? Yes. But it's a much more complicated thing than some small terrorist group. It's woven into the fabric of Lebanese society and it's not going to be made to go away. And so we have to ask ourselves, as the 60 days passes by, can we be sure that the Lebanese part of the ceasefire will hold?
And if it doesn't, what does Donald Trump do?
Well, his option is to try to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu, who has very strong support among certain quarters in the United States. Not just organized Jewish groups, but also evangelical Christians, new conservatives and so on. So Netanyahu is not without leverage. So he can make it look like Trump is abandoning an ally.
But I think Trump will realize that Iran will in fact strike Israel if Israel violates a ceasefire. The Iranians have said hitting Beirut crosses our red line. If Israel were to strike Lebanon again or Beirut again during the 60-day period and the Iranians fired back, you could have what we call in the business a conflict spiral. That is an escalation that gets out of control.
And that could blow up. the memorandum of understanding before the 60 days have elapsed.
Wow. Okay. Well, Rajan, as we said, the MOU is the start of the process for a more detailed deal between the United States and Iran. Tell me, if we only get the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a commitment by Iran not to develop a nuclear weapon, what has actually been achieved over the past three months of this war?
Not much, because the Strait of Hormuz was open before the war began. It is the war that closed the Strait of Hormuz. Now, the nuclear issue has been elevated, so phase two is going to be very, very complicated. It is not clear what kind of leverage Trump is left with in the phase two negotiations. Now, he can say, well, we'll start the war all over again.
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