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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. After days of promising that a ceasefire was near, President Trump late Sunday announced that he had reached a deal with Iran. Today, David Sanger, who spoke to the president, explains what is and is not included in the agreement and how much closer it gets both sides to ending the war for good. It's Monday, June 15th.
David Sanger, thank you so much for joining us.
Rachel, great to be with you.
It is 8 p.m. in New York. It's after 1 a.m. in London where you are right now. So thank you for making the time. Tell us what you know about this very late-breaking deal with Iran.
Well, Rachel, as you know, this deal has been brewing for a long time and it's been subject to a lot of up and down negotiations between Iran and the United States, even as the war went from active combat to a ceasefire. to that flare-up that we saw just in the past week when the U.S. resumed bombing of Iran for several days.
And we thought for a while that that might kill any hope of having what they've just agreed to on Sunday night, which is a preliminary memorandum of understanding. That's really all they've done here, an agreement to reopen the strait, to end the blockade of Iran and to begin a serious conversation about the nuclear program.
And in the end, the United States and the Iranians all determined it was in their interest to do that, to end the fighting and get back to the talking.
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Chapter 2: What led to President Trump's announcement of a deal with Iran?
It's a hazard of White House reporting. He reacted badly to a series of news analyses that made the point that he had not yet accomplished his political objectives, you know, including ending the Iranian nuclear program. And he still hasn't.
But I think he wanted to try to make the case, because I think he cares about what the Times reports, that he was on the road to something that he believes will be better than the Obama deal. It'll be a while before we know whether that's the case.
I think another takeaway from the fact that he called you despite how angry he was with you quite recently is that this deal really matters to him.
Chapter 3: What is included in the framework agreement between the U.S. and Iran?
We have talked on the show about how much the president has been looking for an off ramp to this war. And I just sort of wonder, given all of that, if you could tell us a little bit about what his mood was like. Did he seem, I don't know, victorious at all?
He sounded celebratory, and he clearly thinks that he has found his off-ramp. Now, let's remember, Rachel, that when he went into this war, the Strait of Hormuz was open, and it was running toll-free. One of the things he wanted to tell me was that he believes under this agreement, Iran will never impose tolls again.
Of course, the agreement itself, we believe, we haven't seen the text of it, only refers to suspending tolls for the next 60 days. He also told me that he was convinced that Iran would comply and reach the next stage agreement on the nuclear accord and talked about specific provisions. But we have to remember, he hasn't negotiated any of those positions yet. with the Iranians.
And he said that if Iran didn't complete that deal, he would either resume military action or begin to have the United States patrol the Gulf in return for 20% of all the revenues, presumably mostly oil revenues, that are received in the region. Well, that's a very different use of American power in the Middle East. It's also very Trumpian, right?
So he was trying to make the case that the United States was not only recovering, not only had the blockade worked and the bombing worked, but that he was on the way to remaking the region.
Right. To your point, the threat of demanding 20 percent of a country or region's revenue seems like a very difficult thing to calculate, let alone enforce. But just to summarize, the points that he did say to you seem to be things that we've heard for a while. He is reopening the Strait of Hormuz. There will be no tolls.
There will be a 60-day ceasefire, this lifting of the blockade on Iranian ports. Have we heard from the Iranians in all of this? Like, what is the status of actually signing on the dotted line for all of the parties involved?
As of the moment when we're speaking, neither party has talked about actually signing this agreement, although we're told that there will be, if there hasn't already been, an electronic signing, think a docusign for an international agreement, and then on Friday in Switzerland, a more formal signing that presumably will include Vice President J.D. Vance.
And that would probably be the beginning of the negotiations for the next phase. But what was unusual about the president's call is that as he described and walked me through the nuclear agreements that he believed they were going to reach—
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Chapter 4: How did the recent conflict influence the negotiations for peace?
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David, we have talked a lot on the show about how even though the United States and Israel started this war together, their interests have pretty quickly diverged. We've seen that play out in the negotiations in recent days. We've seen that play out during the course of the war.
Can you tell us a little bit more specifically about how Prime Minister Netanyahu has been a stumbling block to this deal that we saw announced on Sunday?
Well, Rachel, when the history of this war is written, the dynamic between the United States and Israel is going to be one of the most fascinating chapters. You'll remember that it was Prime Minister Netanyahu who made the case that if the U.S.
and Israel attacked Iran together, the country was so fragile that the government would probably collapse in about three days and that it would be taken over by forces that that Israel and the United States would be able to control. And it was at that time that the president said to some of my Times colleagues in other conversations, this is going to be like Venezuela.
And the only peace deal that he would be interested in, he said toward the beginning of the war, was an unconditional surrender by Iran. But as the war got more and more complicated and as the president needed a way out of a conflict in which there was going to be no quick victory and certainly no unconditional surrender, he and Netanyahu began to separate.
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Chapter 5: What insights did David Sanger gain from his conversation with President Trump?
This isn't a peace deal, as you said. It's not a nuclear deal. It's more like a table of contents, as one of the president's aides put it to me, for what needs to be negotiated next. Now, it does have a couple of more specific limitations. For example, it says in the Memorandum of Understanding that
that Iran is going to have to rid itself of its nuclear stockpile and begin to blend that down to a form that can't be used in nuclear weapons. But it's a long way from that general statement to saying who's going to dig this out from under the rubble in Iran, who's going to go melt it down, and who's going to have possession of the nuclear material later on.
So it's not really an enforceable document. And it's very possible that the Iranians think this is all they need to get through two and a half more years of the Trump administration. And that they'll worry about the next steps, which will be lengthy and difficult to execute when they see who's the next president.
David, you have made the points to us before on this show that the demands from the White House about what they want in order to reach a ceasefire have shifted or what their goals are for this war have shifted, such that what we might actually see if this war ended is simply a return to the status quo before it began.
Now that you've spoken to the president and given what you know about what might be included in this deal, I just want to ask you, has your assessment shifted?
It hasn't shifted much, Rachel. In the course of more than four months of war, we certainly have seen the United States succeed at destroying a good deal of Iran's missile capability. Not all of it, but a good deal. It has indeed sunk the Iranian Navy. There wasn't much of one, but it's gone. it has certainly wiped out what was left of the Iranian Air Force.
But this agreement largely gets us back to where we were before the war started, which is to say, with the Strait of Hormuz open, assuming it happens as the president describes and expects, without a blockade of Iranian ports, and with a negotiation over the nuclear program resuming in Switzerland. Now, it does raise one interesting question though, Rachel.
While the president said to me that he wants to make sure the nuclear material that's in Iran gets dug up from beneath the rubble of the facilities that were attacked a year ago by the U.S. Air Force, he didn't sound like he was in a huge rush.
And he thought that the United States could keep an eye on it, that from satellites and from other means, we can make sure the Iranians don't use it to produce a weapon. But if we don't have an urgent reason to get it out, it does raise the question, why did this war happen to begin with?
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