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Chapter 1: What is the current state of U.S.-Iran relations?
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Chapter 2: How has Trump's approach impacted Iran's global leverage?
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Hope to see you all there. Up next, Ben Rhodes. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show the former Deputy National Security Advisor for Barack Obama, co-host of a show called Pod Save the World, and author of a forthcoming book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, released in May. Pre-order it now. It's Benjamin Rhodes.
What's up, Ben? Tim, awesome to be here as always. Thank you so much for doing this. Obviously, the news this morning with the Art of the Deal from our president in Iran brings us to an area of expertise and experience for you. So I'm grateful for your presence. I just want to lay out for folks what we know at the time of the taping here. It's about... about 11 in the east.
Israel and Lebanon had a 10-day ceasefire that went into effect overnight. That led Iran to say that they would open the strait. Trump said that's good, but was still keeping the blockade until we had a final deal. We now have a proposed deal.
Chapter 3: What were the terms of the original JCPOA deal with Iran?
That's not finalized. U.S. and Iranian negotiators are likely to meet Sunday in Islamabad. But Trump is already doing victory laps about it. Axios reports the outlines unfreezing $20 billion of Iran assets. And the U.S. in the last round of talks was demanding a 20-year moratorium on uranium enrichment. Iran counted to five years.
Now they're claiming that in exchange for the $20 million, we would actually get the uranium moratorium. So we'll see if that's how that shakes out. That said, there's a second U.S. official talking to Axios. I wonder who that is, a second U.S. official. Feels kind of like Jared Kushner to me because it's not an administration official. It's a U.S. official.
If it's Barack Ravid, it's Jared Kushner. Yeah, it seems like it's Jared Kushner. A little less bullish than, let's just say, potentially their father-in-law. They're saying that Iran wants the $20 billion and a lot more. They want to sell oil at free market rates without sanctions. They want to participate in the global financial system. They also want to still have their nuclear program.
They want to fund terrorists, and they don't want to give that up enough to get the things we're offering. So, you know, maybe the victory laps a little early for Trump. TBD, we'll see. But that's kind of the outlines of the deal. He's tweeting this morning. Many thanks to Pakistan, all the Arab states, and he's dunking on NATO for not helping us.
Chapter 4: How does the new proposed deal differ from the JCPOA?
So what are your reactions to the current state of play?
I mean, Tim, we are in the most absurd timeline here because essentially we have to just live with the truth, right? Not the true social post, but the actual truth, which is that Donald Trump launched a war against thinking that there would be quick and easy regime change. None of that happened. He killed thousands of people with this war. He spent hundreds of billions of dollars.
He probably wiped out trillions of dollars in price increases. You've got countries where people can't even access fuel. He decimated what was left of our international relationship. The rest of the world kind of looks at us warily like a rogue state that could knock anything over at any time. And now he's trumpeting the fact that
He has reopened the very strait that was open before he launched the war. And perhaps he will get Iran to ship out its highly enriched uranium stockpile. And we can talk more about how that's not necessarily at all getting rid of their nuclear program. And yet the regime is in place.
They have demonstrated their capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz, which gives them extraordinary deterrence and leverage going forward over the global economy. And... No suggestion that they're going to change their approach to supporting proxy groups across the region. No indication that they're going to abandon a ballistic missile program.
I guess we sunk a bunch of Iranian ships and destroyed a bunch of ballistic missiles, but they can manufacture those. So, On the scale of what we accomplished versus the destruction we wrought, I'm glad this is happening.
It's better than destroying a civilization and perpetuating the war, but we must keep the perspective here because there's going to be a tremendous amount of propaganda that suggests that somehow this was a great deal when, in fact, this was a deal you could have had easily without fighting the war. But other than that, pretty good. So, I mean, I'm just, you know, I'm glad it's happening.
I mean, but I can feel what's coming from Trump and his, you know, echo chamber, to use a phrase. And I think we just have to look at reality.
So I want to break this down a little bit more detail, but I thought it would be useful given that you're the guest on the podcast and that you were there for the JCPOA.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East?
For people who either tuned into politics in 2015 because of Trump who are listening to this and weren't really around for that or for those of us who've Had a lot of drinks since the JCPOA. And so our memories are a little bit fuzzy. Just for a basis of comparison, if you could do just a little bit of a 101, like what was the deal between when you guys were in charge between Obama and Iran?
And then how does that compare to kind of what they're talking about?
So in terms of what the deal was, in terms of what the US got out of the deal, Iran agreed to strict limitations on the nuclear program. So just to go through a few of them, they shipped their stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country. So this thing that Trump is going to be touting was routine under the JCPOA.
Like whatever stockpile they accumulated, they had to ship out 98% of their enriched uranium at any given time. And then they submitted- Where would it go? It would go to Russia, and it would be blended down, and it would go to Russia. And essentially, they would get end use of things like medical isotopes, but they couldn't accumulate the stockpile in their country.
They destroyed the core of their plutonium reactor, so they kind of wiped out their capacity to pursue a nuclear weapon with plutonium. They accepted limitations on the number of centrifuges that they could be operating, all of their facilities were under strict monitoring from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA.
Not only were there kind of centrifuge facilities at Natanz and Fordow, the two facilities where they operated centrifuges, not only did they have those limitations and have IAEA presence there, including cameras, and it wasn't just people showing up every few weeks. It was kind of constant monitoring. But there was also monitoring
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.
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Chapter 6: How is the Democratic party positioning itself regarding war and peace?
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. We were negotiating on the nuclear program. And then there were these kind of different durations for aspects of the deal. Some of the more strict limitations of the deal lasted 10 years. Some of them lasted 15 years. People freaked out about this. But Tim, to me, that always was...
The most, I don't know, absurd critique in some ways because that's how most nuclear arms treaties are, right? The U.S.-Russia New START treaty that we negotiated with the Russians during the Obama years had a 10-year duration. Nobody freaked out about that because you renegotiate after 10 years, right? You see how things are there.
And I should say that the sanctions on Iran – this is important – remained in place. The United States did not lift sanctions on Iran. They got sanctions relief. They didn't get sanctions removed under the deal. So again, there's so many more dimensions to this argument.
Just a couple of follow-ups. So like the relief was to the tune of about a half a billion. Is that right? Like four or 500 million?
No, this is a different piece of the deal. But essentially, when we tallied up how much we thought Iran was getting from the deal, it went up to about $50 billion.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential consequences of the recent U.S.-Iran deal?
They had something like $150 billion. And again, I'm literally going off of my memory from 10 years ago. Yeah, sure. But somewhere in the neighborhood, $150 billion in frozen...
revenues right so they've been shipping oil out to places like china and india and just not able to access their own money yeah right so it was cast as like payments from us but in fact their capacity to access revenue for stuff they've already uh sold in a way now very importantly the famous 450 million dollars pallets of cash
was a separate part of the implementation of the deal where Iran released a number of Americans who were detained in Iran, including Jason Rezaian, who we both know, the Washington Post journalist. In response to that, Iran had purchased some weapons from the United States before the Shah was ousted. And we never delivered those weapons, unsurprisingly.
And various international courts had found that the United States owed Iran this amount of money. And so essentially, we were closing different accounts with Iran. And so Iran was paid for the weapons that they never received. And this became one of the most insane freakouts from the Republican Party and the
FDD-verse to those who are nerds, when in fact it's a drop in the bucket compared to what Trump has already unfrozen in this war to sweeten the pot for the Iranians.
I want to get back to the freakout from the FDD crowd in a second, but just a few, just on the fact. So it was set to expire. When would that deal, the JCPOA, have completely expired? When would they have been allowed to start to advance the nuclear program again?
Yeah, so first of all, Iran also said, because Trump always makes this comment that they've never said they won't develop a nuclear weapon. The preamble to the JCPOA was a permanent promise, a pledge, a commitment from the Iranians to never develop a nuclear weapon. So there was a permanent prohibition on Iran ever developing a nuclear weapon or weaponizing their nuclear program.
People think about this as if they get enough fuel and suddenly they magically have a nuclear weapon. No, they have to figure out how to put that on a warhead, right? They have to weaponize their nuclear program. That was permanent. And there were a number of things in the deal that were permanent, including having to submit to IAEA inspections. After about 10 years...
you know, there were certain some of the restrictions on the numbers of centrifuges that Iran could operate, that that ceiling started to go up. Right. And the kinds of research and development that they could do on more advanced centrifuges so that they can reach uranium quicker, those started to lift. And now this became another source of general freak out to the FDG crowd.
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Chapter 8: How does the guest view the future of U.S. foreign policy?
I do have to say, Tim, here, because Donald Trump pulled out of this deal in 2018, long before the end of the sunset periods. So pulling out of the deal, they put the centrifuges back in. They started using the advanced centrifuges. They started to acquire a stockpile of enriched uranium.
So the geniuses in not just the Trump administration, but at the FDD and these other hawkish places got what they wanted, which is a much faster acceleration of the uranium nuclear program than would have been the case under the JCPOA. And this is one of the reasons why I try not to think about it too much.
And this is important context because in a lot of ways, Trump, too, is negotiating against Trump one as we come to this deal. Right. Because, like, you know, not everything about the Iranian nuclear program or everything about the ballistic missiles or the other stuff they've been trying to get out of this war, you know, changed when they got out of the deal.
But Iran advanced the program that we are now using. like negotiating again to get them to stop. You know, if you can think of a deal, it's like, you know, we're American. So it's like the football field, like they were able to move the ball further down than it would have been like, had it been status quo.
The point is that before this war, because Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, Iran's nuclear program was more advanced than it was before the JCPOA, never mind with the JCPOA restrictions. They had more of a stockpile of highly enriched uranium. They were using more advanced centrifuges. All the things that the critics of the JCPOA warned about, they were doing because Iran
Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018. So we ostensibly went to war against Donald Trump's own policy of pulling out of the JCPOA, which is something that these people will never acknowledge for the rest of my lifetime, but it is the truth.
I can feel your anger building. I want to keep it building a little bit more before we start talking about how the right-wing hawks are going to react to this. Just kind of to put a button on it then. Based on the contours of what we're seeing now, we don't know exactly what will come out of Islamabad.
Give us a little compare and contrast with where we will end up versus where we were at the end when they pulled out of the JCPOA.
I assume that... If in the good scenario, in the best case scenario in which Iran makes a deal and this war ends comprehensively, They'll ship that stockpile out. 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.
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