(edited transcript)
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Then & Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.
JONATHAN ALTER:
And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Jon, I remember weeks ago we touched on this, but I think it’s the question people need to keep asking.
In 2015, President Obama—who you wrote about—completed a historic deal with Iran on nuclear weapons. The formal name was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. It was controversial, although many people were optimistic that it would curtail Iran’s nuclear capacity.
Fast-forward to today. President Trump and his administration have announced a memorandum of understanding, with some details emerging about what an agreement with Iran would theoretically look like.
How do the two compare in terms of what Obama achieved versus what Trump has—or hasn’t—achieved?
JONATHAN ALTER:
Let’s just talk about the JCPOA for a second, because people totally misunderstood that deal.
I remember going to Israel and interviewing security officials there who knew it was a good deal, but politically it was impossible for them to say so publicly.
Under that agreement, Iran didn’t merely promise to ship out 97 percent of its enriched uranium—they actually did it. All they had left under the deal could only be enriched to a little over 3 percent, which isn’t anywhere close to what’s needed to make a nuclear weapon.
Then Trump blew up the deal in 2018, with considerable help from the Israelis.
As a result, Iran now has uranium enriched to more than 60 percent. Nothing in this new deal requires them to ship it out of the country. They’re going to try to blend it down, but that process can easily be reversed.
Republicans spent years screaming that Obama had “given Iran billions of dollars.” In reality, he provided only limited sanctions relief. This new agreement would provide complete sanctions relief. Iran would initially receive something like $20 billion, and eventually roughly $300 billion would flow into the country.
This is one of the most disastrous acts of surrender in modern diplomatic history. It’s further evidence of this president’s extraordinary incompetence.
It’s hard to exaggerate how complete this surrender to Iran is. Iran basically won. They got what they wanted, and moving forward they can hold the world hostage through the Strait of Hormuz.
The deal essentially says they can start charging tolls there before long. That’s terrible for the global economy, regardless of the nuclear provisions. It will hurt countries around the world.
It’s pretty clear what this was about, Julian. Trump wanted to get gas prices down before the midterm election. That’s all he cares about. He’s trying to avoid impeachment, and he knew that if he waited any longer, there wouldn’t be enough time for those prices to come down.
So he made the deal now, entirely on Iran’s terms. We got nothing.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
The Art of the Bad Deal could be his next book.
Thank you for that comparison. I think that’s exactly the question people need to keep coming back to—the comparison between what we had and what we might be getting now.
Thanks, Jon. We’ll talk again next week.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Bye, Julian.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Bye-bye.
