Are the terms of the deal public yet? If they're essentially a return to the status quo ante bellum, that would be a pretty embarrassing conclusion for the US (and would presumably further harden any belief within Iran that the only permanent regime-preserving solution involves accelerating the process of obtaining nuclear weapons).
>According to remarks carried by the Tasnim news agency, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said negotiations for a final deal will be held during a 60-day period, after verifying that the US implemented its commitments under the deal, including ending hostilities, lifting the blockade, and releasing frozen assets.
So, it's an even worse position for the US than before launching the war.
Didn’t Iran consider their previous US negotiations a sham? Why would they believe them this time? Feels like the US wants to approach them with these deals, reneg, and once Iran is like we don’t want anymore deals, then the US can point to them and be like, see they don’t want peace.
For one thing, the US has agreed to give Iran $12 billion of their frozen assets before negotiations start, and another $12 billion during the 60 day negotiation period. When you repeatedly bomb the other side while prior negotiations were ongoing, before having to conclude that a negotiated settlement is the only way out of this, you have to make big concessions to even get the other side to the negotiating table.
Iran was fully abiding by the JCPOA (Obama Iran deal) until Trump pulled out in his first term. Trump hates Obama so that was entirely out of spite.
What is surprising is how co-opted the Biden admin was by Israel, that they didn't even bother to even consider reentering it despite it being a Democratic party "win" when it was first announced.
No, they tried to negotiate a new deal, not go back to the one they had agreed to. Why would Iran trust any new negotiations?
Iran was naive enough to trust the US twice in the last year and HAD THEIR NEGOTIATING TEAM BOMBED! I'm shocked they even trust the US to hold up to the deal they signed today. I'm guessing US concessions on frozen assets was just too much to pass up.
I think if we’re honest, the most likely outcome under Kamela would be that the US would not have attacked Iran, so there would be nothing to negotiate. It’s possible Israel may have done so anyway without US support.
The conclusion has long been embarassing unless we live under a rock.
The US president has been played like a fool by the Israelis and Iran has inflicted a humiliating defeat to the US and its allies by leveraging cheap asymmetric warfare.
I think this war's first phase was clearly in Israel's favor, insofar as Israel's strategic goal is neutralizing Iran as a peer adversary. But the latter phases have not really gone how they (= Netanyahu) want/s; the ideal end state for Israel is an enormous civilian infrastructure cost to Iran that would subtract from military budgeting, but that isn't what the deal suggests.
(Intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure is, of course, a war crime.)
Israel seems to have also lost out because any further war crimes they commit will get Trump angry, he's desperate to keep Iran from returning fire and further wrecking his midterms.
But heck, if I were Iran I'd be wary after November. With Russia-style election rigging and spineless congress, Trump-Hegseth might resume the war crimes...
It looks like it is more an MoU than a deal, and I think that allows Trump the cover to drip feed out how humiliating it is, because this isn't the kind of band-aid you rip off all at once.
If I were a betting man I would bet that between now and Friday there will be too much news coverage of just how humiliating this is for the USA, how bad a deal it is, and how much of failure it is, and Trump himself will pull out of the deal. This has, allegedly, happened at least once.
But Iran now seem to be a bit better schooled in how to actually get him to agree, so perhaps they will be persuaded to smile a shit-eating grin while he takes a victory lap, and simply keep the most humiliating details of it under wraps until he signs.
How long it is before Trump claims to renegotiate it, who knows. Just the other day Trump said he might not renew USMCA — his own prior great achievement of loudly renegotiating NAFTA to be not significantly worse.
I can see the logic in what you’re saying, but Iran state media is reporting the deal includes “The US and its allies delivering reconstruction plans for Iran worth at least $300bn” (in addition to the $25B) but I don’t understand their use of the word “plan”? https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cj0grpyg4v1t?post=asset%3A1793...
Two diplomats briefed on the latest draft called it “an international ‘investment fund,’ which the United States would help facilitate in the event of a final deal,” and plans for which would be discussed during the initial 60-day negotiations period that the memorandum would kick off, the report says.
It appears to concern the authorisation of a sort of Marshall Plan inward investment fund that may end up holding that sort of amount of cash that the US effectively agrees to facilitate and allow.
But I guess a key thing is that it involves is the USA agreeing not to seize it. It would also implicitly allow businesses to do the reconstruction work without being sanctioned.
“Art of the deal.” Thousands of deaths and tens to hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed and spent to be in a worse position than before this started.
There have been persistent rumours that Iran will be allowed to charge new "environmental fees" for access, "to protect the ecosystem of the Strait" or somesuch.
(Secretary of War and former Fox News weekend anchor Pete Hegseth was on the news just this evening saying that the USA has been in control of the Strait the whole time, so I think the USA is arguing against your (correct) characterisation of the situation.)
>(Secretary of War and former Fox News weekend anchor Pete Hegseth was on the news just this evening saying that the USA has been in control of the Strait the whole time, so I think the USA is arguing against your (correct) characterisation of the situation.)
Essentially, the USA has indeed been the one keeping the straight closed. They wanted oil going to China stopped. That was the reason the Navy was there.
Iranians have said they cannot charge a "toll" according to international law, but they can charge a "fee". Charging a fee for maintanance, environment or security is fine, so it will be just a different branding to the "toll". Personally I think they should charge an environmental fee with the amount of traffic going through there.
If I understand 'jeffbee correctly, I think they mean that Iran now has practical evidence that it can gum up the strait and therefore extract political concessions from it, even if they don't literally result in tolling.
(In other words, every barrel of oil that passes through the straight will now have an $X risk surcharge on it, whether or not that surcharge ends up in Iran's coffers.)
Trump also said he would refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve "right to the top" in 6 weeks and, instead, emptied it to its lowest level ever. He also said foreign investment in the United States would rise to 22 trillion dollars, but instead total foreign investment weakened to below $300 billion in 2025. Oh, and he also said tariffs were cutting the deficit by 25%, while he instead managed the deficit to a slightly higher level, even before counting the Iran War.
Much the contrary, it showed them that without a nuclear weapon they can be attacked willy-nilly by the USA/Israel, without a nuke it doesn't matter what kind of agreement or deal they reach it can always be reneged.
Iran looks at North Korea and want that kind of regime stability, at least from outside threats.
I think you are in some kind of wishful thinking world.
The USA and Israel have killed dozens of leaders, creating a vacuum which is being filled by other radicals just like the ones before. The IRGC is still there, the hardliners are taking more control of the government, I can't picture the state you mention "crushed philosophically and intellectually" at all.
Whoever is left to rebuild Iran is going to be from the same fabric that was there before this pointless war, with the added experience of what happens when you don't actually pursue a nuke but use that rhetoric as a bargaining chip. The bargain didn't work, the only way ahead for those hardliners to maintain power in the future (20-50 years) is to acquire a nuclear weapon, otherwise there's nothing that guarantee them that Israel and the USA won't attack again.
You think that radical religious zealotry gets "exhausted" like that? They will hold a grudge, and never want to be in that position again.
To the contrary, the war has proven to Iran how critical their nuclear program is to the regime's, and maybe Iran's, survival.
US wouldn't go into such a war against Russia, because of their nuclear program. They wouldn't have attacked Iran if they already had a standing nuclear program with strategic nuclear weaponary.
What are their options now? Strategically focus on rebuilding their defense capabilities with most likely the same result in 10-25 years or strategically focus on nuclear weapons so that adversaries won't rage war against them like that again in 10-25 years?
You are theoretically right to assume this but practically this will never happen (i.e iran's nuclear ambitions) .. let me explain
As Putin once quipped, "having the desire to do something is very different from having the ability to do something" ..
Iran can desire as much as they like to "want" and "have" a nuclear program .. but the objective truth is that US just crushed the intellectual and philosophical source of this desire by eliminating their rolodex of ayatollahs ... whether you agree or not with this approach is a different matter but US has been successful in scrubbing the source of that desire so aggressively that the new hopefuls are simply exhausted to play the nuclear long game ..
Now at a personal note, I live between Dubai and London (previously Hamburg) and all these places have a significant Iranian diaspore and not a single one of those people in my circle is against what the US did and is doing in Iran ..
What hilarious though is that some HN folks have such vitriolic hate for Trump (based on the comments of the OP's post) that they'd rather see Iran have a nuclear capability than admitting that the defanging of Iran's nuclear program has been a good thing for the world ...
> and not a single one of those people in my circle is against what the US did and is doing in Iran ..
Interestingly the Iranians I've talked to (Eg: a married couple both with nuclear physics degrees from Iran who bailed out long long ago) would prefer to see Iran still being monitored and kept in check - they are concerned that Trump has not defanged the HEU program, merely scattered and set it back somewhat, while at the same time increasing the likelihood of rogue use of HEU and or those cache's being fed into an actual unchecked weapons program elsewhere.
A big issue, not so much discussed, is where exactly has the HEU ended up, in how many parts, and under whose control. Was it buried under rubble? Is it secure in a void? Was it moved and sequestered into multiple parts before Trump went loco?
Expats are expats for a reason. They tend to not be aligned with the domestic views of the country they left. Often the leave exactly because their politics are incompatible with local ideology.
Depends why they're expats so "they tend to" have lots of different reasons for immigrating. Iranian Nuclear scientists living abroad have different reasons for doing compared to Americans living in Tijuana. Culturally, there's a tendency to be more conservative to keep the values and norms of the old country, when the old country has moved on.
Your argument here is disjointed. The claims that, 1) Iran does not desire a nuclear device, and 2) The United States was justified in striking the IRGC do nothing to refute the parent.
"Practically" speaking, this deal is not any more potent than the JCPOA pinkie-promise. It returns us to the status quo of hoping that Iran doesn't develop a nuclear weapon, which was the exact same flimsy flypaper logic that failed to stop South Africa and North Korea from making their nukes.
If the goal of this war is to denuclearize Iran, then it has failed on both accounts. Justified or not, the US air campaign eg. Midnight Hammer failed to prevent escalation and deprive Iran of access to their nuclear material. The domestic uranium mines, centrifuge factories, nuclear equipment stockpiles and underground missile cities all appear to have survived the strikes. Desire it or not, Iran has nuclear research within their reach, and Israel will continue to use it to manufacture support for a bloody land invasion.
> they'd rather see Iran have a nuclear capability than admitting that the defanging of Iran's nuclear program has been a good thing for the world
Again, this argument is disconnected. Nuclear proliferation is widely detested, which is why this war has been so seriously criticized. America's air campaign would not defang Iran's nuclear program, officers knew this going into the conflict and warned that the collateral damage would not be worth the outcome.
Even if this conflict did succeed in deterring Iran from a nuclear bomb, then it's a return to the 2017-era status quo that Trump disrupted by ripping up the JCPOA. From a nonproliferation standpoint, this was a bloody and pointless war.
The US, under Trump, has moved from a state in which
* regular checks kept HEU processing in Iran under agreed limits,
* tunnels were traversed and inertially mapped,
* leaders were known, and communicated with
to a state in which
* tunnels have been expanded, unmapped
* locations of and numbers of HEU caches are no longer known,
* "leadership" has devolved into a mosaic of cells such that, at best, one or two people know where all HEU caches are, more probably no single person knows where the caches are.
In this later, current state it's far more probable that one or more rogue cells may take their HEU caches and attempt to maximise damage to the US and or Israel.
The DoD under Trump has literally made a poor situation far far worse and greatly increased the likelihood of rogue nuclear weapons.
They have had cards since they demonstrated, in mid March, that they would blockade the Strait, could destroy the Kuwaiti oil economy with very cheap drones, and were prepared to do the same to more US allies.
The USA functionally lost this war on the 20th of March when the threat to Kuwait was demonstrated. Everything that has happened since was just delaying the inevitable. It was a mistake.
> The most alarming aspect of 60% enrichment is how close it brings a country to weapons-grade material 4344. The enrichment work required to move from 60% to 90% is substantially less than the work needed to reach 60% from natural uranium 4546. This means a country with 60% enriched uranium stockpiles could potentially produce weapons-grade material in a matter of weeks or even days.
This would be a lot more concerning if it wasn't widely known that Israel also illegally holds nuclear weapons of its own and therefore should have been sanctioned by the US for decades. Not having nukes is how Iran got here in the first place - the POTUS unilaterally withdrawing from their agreement and bombing them in the middle of negotiations. For all the portrayals of the Iranian government as "lunatics" over the years, getting to nuclear ASAP is the only logical move for a country in Iran's position - just look at how the US went back on its sabre rattling against North Korea once they demonstrated nuclear capabilities.
You don't have to think the Iranian government is in any way "good" but there's literally no logical reason for them not to desperately try to get their hands on nuclear weapons at this point. They have no reason to trust the West to ever follow through on any promises again.
I think this is true for any country. If you are willing to take the risks that come with looking like you're building a bomb, you're obviously much better off once you have them. I personally don't think nonproliferation was ever in the long run a lasting result; it could only ever work as long as most countries are satisfied with being client states.
You left out the part that they went past the 3.5% after Trump pulled out of the deal. While they were in it, they were complying fully as per IAEA and the US State department themselves.
I didn't leave out anything. I was making a factual statement that the Iranian nuclear program had already been "accelerated" to a point where objectively, with the engineering expertise they doubtlessly have, they could have potentially built a bomb within weeks or months, as the most difficult and time-consuming part was already done, which is why nonproliferation proponents get so upset about that level of enrichment.
Whether this is Trump's or Biden's or Joe Rogan's or a space alien's fault is for other commenters to discuss. I do not find the politics interesting. Nuclear science is interesting.
