Transcript of Did Iran Come Out on Top in the Peace Deal? New

I'm Jonathan Knight, and I'm the general manager of New York Times Games. Our puzzles are human-made every day with the standards you'd expect from the New York Times. And this matters because when you choose to spend time with our games, it should be time well spent solving puzzles handcrafted for you. We think that's something worth investing in and something worth paying for.

Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games at nytimes.com/join games.

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily.

On Sunday, we reached an agreement with Iran that achieves everything we set out to accomplish, everything and much more.

After the U.S. and Iran signed a deal to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz this week, the Trump administration touted it as a huge victory.

We and the broader region win. Iran is weakened, their nuclear program destroyed, their economy in desperate straits.

But when the actual terms of the agreement became public—

This will go down as a tremendous foreign policy blunder.

It prompted a wave of criticism from lawmakers in both parties about what exactly the Trump administration had given up. It's not even comparable to the Obama deal. It's worse by a lot.

Iran ends up stronger. Our allies in the region are weaker. There's no specific commitment to the verifiable dismantling of their nuclear weapons program.

History demonstrates rates, that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is an exceptionally bad idea.

I think it's a deep mistake.

Today, my colleague David Sanger explains what the U.S. gets out of the deal and just how much Iran stands to gain. It's Friday, June 19th. David, hello again. At this point, it feels like you are on the daily. Almost every other day. So thank you so much for giving us so much of your time.

Great to be with you, Natalie, as always.

We talked to you earlier in the week when we learned that we had a deal to end this war, which at that point no one had actually seen. And then on Wednesday, the Trump administration came out with the details of what was actually in it. And I think it's fair to say that those details elicited a very big reaction in lots of interesting ways, which we want to get into. But first, What is in this deal? Start with what the US got.

Well, the main thing that the US got, Natalie, was a 60-day ceasefire in the war and sort of a return to the status quo, at least for a little while, that existed before the US and Israel attacked Iran. But the key thing to know is that it didn't really address any of the issues that led the president and Prime Minister Netanyahu to attack Iran. It just sort of resets the clock, and it has one paragraph on what was the underlying cause of this war, which is Iran's nuclear program.

And what does it say about the program?

Well, this is the only paragraph that actually puts an affirmative obligation on Iran. And let me read part of it to you, Natalie, 'cause I think you'll get a sense of it. Please. The first sentence says, "The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons." Now, the president's been making a big deal of this, that the Iranians have promised not to do this. The only problem with that is they made the same promise in 1970 when they ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Right.

They made the same promise in 2015 when they signed the Obama-era deal. It's on the first page.

The key word there seems to be reaffirms.

Reaffirms. Then it's got a second part of this saying that they agree to sit down and talk about what they're going to do about all of Iran's nuclear program, its stockpiles of uranium, its nuclear facilities, its programs to continue enriching uranium. And they set a minimum level here, and the minimum level is that Iran agrees that they're going to take their 11 tons of material, although they don't specify the number here, and they're going to downblend it.

And what does that mean exactly? What is downblending?

Downblending means diluting it, essentially. And their concern is that we know the Iranians have about £970 that's enriched to 60%, very close to what you could use in a bomb. But then they've got literally tons of other material enriched at different levels. So what the US is saying here is you're agreeing that as a minimum you're going to downblend that basically to reactor level.

So if I understand this correctly, diluting it sets back the program. Does it destroy the material? Is it effectively the same as destroying the material, which the president has said again and again is the goal here?

No, Natalie, diluting it is not the same as destroying it. This is a daily broadcast, not a physics class, so I, I won't bore you with the details.

Um, you never bore us, David.

But the fact of the matter is it all depends here on the details of what they do with it. If they simply downblend it, There is always the risk that later on they could re-enrich it. But the important thing to know here is what they're not committing to, which is actually shipping the material out of the country.

Why is that significant?

Well, during the Obama-era deal in 2015, they actually did agree to ship out about 97% of the stockpile they had at the time.

Mm-hmm.

Now, they built up much more over the past, 8 or 9 years since President Trump left that agreement in 2018. And the fact of the matter is the Iranians have not yet agreed to actually ship it out of the country, which of course would be the safest thing from a nonproliferation standard.

Well, to that point, on the whole, when it comes to everything relating to nuclear weapons in this deal, how does it compare to what Obama got? You've told us how much Trump cares about his deal being better than Obama's. So is it?

Not yet. So the administration talks a lot about conversations that they have had, understandings they think they have struck with the Iranians on the side that would resolve the big nuclear issues. But that negotiation is going to be so complex that they kicked it to a completely separate set of talks that are supposed to start in the next few days and run for 60 days. Hmm. Although everybody, including the president, has said they expect it to take longer.

So when the administration is promising that their deal is gonna be better than Obama's, they're really counting on those future negotiations because right now that just isn't the case.

That's right. And you can't even compare these documents because the Obama-era agreement was 150 pages of what you do with the material, how you'd inspect it, what kind of facilities you have to close, which ones you can keep open. It was incredibly detailed, and the Iranians fought over every paragraph.

Mm-hmm.

So that's not what this document is. This document's about a ceasefire. It's only got one paragraph that really deals directly with the nuclear program at all. And so the big issue here is what do you get in the second negotiation?

Okay, so that remains to be settled. What about the Strait of Hormuz? This is obviously the thing that was absolutely necessary for the US in order to get to this deal in the first place. You told us earlier in the week that the administration has been touting that the strait would be open without Iran charging tolls for ships to pass through it. Is that what's in the deal on that front?

Well, kinda. It's in the deal for 60 days, the 60 days of this ceasefire. Let me go back and read it to you again, Natalie. This is from paragraph 5 of the deal.

Okay.

The Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vehicles with no charge for 60 days only from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. So it's short-term. And then that same paragraph refers to starting up a dialogue with Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz. So what does that mean? That tells you that after the 60 days is over, the document kind of acknowledges that Iran and Oman, which is right opposite it in the strait, may well figure out some way to exercise their sovereignty and charge something.

Mm-hmm.

I doubt they'll call it a toll. They'll probably call it a service fee for keeping the strait open. So that's not quite returning things to the way they were in Earlier mid-February of 2026.

Right, because back then, pre-war, there was no fee or toll at all to go through the strait. And now what this document seems to be suggesting is that the likely outcome is that we don't go back to that pre-war status, and instead they're gonna come up with some kind of scheme where Iran and Oman will have oversight over a new structure.

That's right. And look, there's one side of this which is money, and I'm sure the people are going through the Strait don't want to pay it. I don't like paying tolls going down the Jersey Turnpike, okay?

But that's—

You and me both.

That's life. But the bigger import of this is that it also suggests that Iran and Oman have some sovereign rights over this very narrow passageway that is also considered an international waterway. And if you've got rights over it to charge tolls, you may consider that you've got the right to shut it down in the future. And if that's the case, then the world has changed in a very big way at the end of this war from the way it was before.

So how should we think about this provision in the deal, David? Because what I'm hearing is that you may have Iran charging tolls, making money off of the traffic through the strait, which seems like a huge win for them. But on the other hand, the strait will be open, which points to this other big obvious thing that the US gets from this deal, which is that now the war is over and you can have oil tankers flowing through this waterway. It should be good for consumers. We saw Wall Street had a huge reaction to that. How do you assess?

Well, it's a big win for us because we get to go back to something that approximates the conditions prior to President Trump's decision to go to war.

Mm-hmm.

So yes, that's a reason the markets reacted so well. The price of oil dropped. Hopefully the price of gasoline will drop. But over the long term, if you have changed the concept of whether or not Iran has control over the strait, well, that's a huge change because in the 47 years of the Islamic Revolution through the hostage crisis and the Iran-Iraq War and our attacks on their centrifuges, both covert in 2010 and overt last year when the facilities were bombed, the Iranians never thought seriously about trying to close the strait.

And should we take from that that President Trump is prioritizing solving the immediate economic issues caused by the war over preventing Iran from having this new source of power? Long term.

Natalie, he said as much in Europe.

So the one thing I didn't want to see is I didn't want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened.

He twice noted the experience of Herbert Hoover, the 31st president, right, who presided over the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression.

So rather than possibly going into a depression rather than having your favorite president be Herbert Hoover? I was always the one I didn't want to be.

And he said, "I don't want to be that guy." So I don't think I'll make mistakes like that.

I lower taxes, I don't raise taxes. In fact, we just gave you—

And so it told you right away that a president who went into this war thinking first about Iran's nuclear and missile capability and the threats it poses had to emerge from it because he feared plunging the United States into a recession at best.

Mm-hmm.

For him, this is not just an economic calculation, it's a political calculation. His entire party was telling him that if these gas prices stayed up through the summer when everybody's driving, into the midterms that he's got a big problem. And we all know that it's gonna take months to have a significant economic impact for countries to be able to build up their reserves of oil again and for the prices to begin to drop in a serious way. So if he didn't do it now, it wasn't gonna happen before the midterm elections.

But despite that, you hear a lot of people in Trump's own party saying that this is not a good deal. You had Bill Cassidy, Cassidy, a moderate Republican senator, calling it the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.

Yes, it was a pretty striking line from Senator Cassidy, and similar to things we heard off the record until this agreement got published. And now we're hearing more and more of it, but that's mostly because of how much Iran gets up front.

We'll be right back.

I'm Paul Tenorio. I cover soccer for The Athletic.

And I'm Amy Lawrence. I cover football for The Athletic.

Whatever you call it, the biggest competition in the sport is happening right now, and The Athletic's World Cup coverage has everything you need to follow the tournament.

There's 48 countries taking part, from the tiny island of Curaçao to the 5-time champions Brazil. Even if you don't know your offside from your onside, if you're eager to know more about the teams, the matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, We've got you sorted.

Maybe you're the kind of person who's already up early every weekend, waking the neighbors when your favorite club scores. We'll make sure you get equipped with more information, more insight than anyone you know.

We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground covering the ins and outs from every game.

I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to The Athletic's World Cup coverage in our app.

Download The Athletic app and see you there.

Okay, David, walk us through what Iran gets out of this, because this is the part of the deal when it came out this week that I think was the most surprising. So what are the big upfront benefits for Iran?

Well, the biggest upfront benefit, Natalie, is the blockade goes away. And that American blockade, to remind you, was a blockade against any shipping traffic coming into Iran. And any going out.

Right.

So it basically bottled up all of their oil shipments. That's all over. So they can start shipping and money will be flowing to Iran again through those sales. And that all happens immediately. Now, once they get that oil money flowing, obviously they've got a lot of people suffering. They have a lot of rebuilding to go do. But one of the big concerns is Once the money comes in, it will probably be spent in part on rebuilding many of their military facilities that were destroyed during the war.

So just to be clear, once this oil money starts coming in, the US has no control over how it's spent or where it goes.

Money is fungible, and as soon as it comes in, and there's nothing in the agreement that restricts where that money goes.

Got it. Okay, so that seems very good for Iran. What else do they get right away? Well, not right away.

Natalie, but very soon they begin to get access to some of that $24 or $25 billion in frozen assets, Iranian money that has been locked up in financial institutions for years, and they've been deeply interested in getting it back.

This has been a huge priority for the regime.

It is the priority that you hear most often. So let me take you back to the wording of this memorandum of understanding. There's hidden kind of phrase in here in which the agreement says that the money can be fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by Iran's central bank. Well, there are a lot of beneficiaries in Iran who are designated as terrorists or they're on sanctions lists, and this seems to suggest that they too could be recipients.

So this sounds like another huge infusion of cash on top of the money from oil sales. In which there aren't really any restrictions necessarily or strings attached.

The only string attached is that administration officials say that it will be doled out with performance, or as the president says, with good behavior. But it's earned a lot of criticism. And why is that? Because for 11 years, many Republicans, including Donald Trump, have been going after the Obama administration for returning $1.7 billion to the Iranians back in 2015. But $1.7 billion, big as it is, really pales in comparison to $24 billion. And that's to say nothing of an even bigger pot of money that is described vaguely in the agreement, and that would be a $300 billion economic development fund for Iran.

Yeah, this has been confusing to me. First of all, That is just a staggering amount of money. And second of all, I'm not clear on exactly how this is going to work. Where is that money coming from, David?

Well, no one's quite sure. The US says it's not coming from American taxpayers, but that it would get out of the way if others wanted to go invest in Iran. So one way to think about this is a Marshall Plan for Iran. Which is how we rebuilt Germany after the war.

Right.

But not coming from American taxpayers. Presumably it would come from the Gulf allies. Now, let's stop and acknowledge for a moment, this may never happen.

Hmm.

Right? I'm not even sure how the Iranian economy could absorb $300 billion. And the place is so riven with corruption that a lot of investors would be rightly concerned to think that their money would disappear into the black hole of Iran, where the IRGC, the military, does not exactly conform with normal accounting standards. But the concept is that they would get the benefit. And this has raised a lot of concern in Congress, Natalie.

Right. The idea is that while there's a lot about this fund that is unclear at this point, the fact that it's in the deal suggests that the US will in some way try to facilitate that money getting to Iran. How does the administration explain that? How do they defend this?

Well, the first thing they say is you can't reintegrate a country with the global economy unless you make it possible. But remember, for years we have used the Treasury's huge powers to control the dollar, to cut off all forms of funding that we can find coming into Iran.

Mm-hmm.

And so this commits the administration to reversing all of that, presumably again in return for performance. But the markers of performance are not described in this document.

And what about sanctions relief? This has been another huge issue for Iran. They've been under strict economic sanctions for a really long time.

That's right. And those sanctions are on all kinds of things. They're on banking, they're on export controls, and they come from all kinds of places. Some have been placed by President Trump, some were kept in place by Joe Biden, who never reversed the Trump sanctions. Some go back to the Bush administration. There are sanctions that Congress has imposed. There are sanctions the United Nations Security Council has imposed.

Layers upon layers of sanctions.

It's a big, complicated morass. But the agreement is very clear. The US undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against Iran, including all kinds of international sanctions. But again, It says that they will negotiate the details and the schedule of this as part of that 60-day negotiation. So again, the administration is relying in a very Trumpian way on the concept that the Iranians will value turning on the money spigot more than holding on to their nuclear program.

Taking all of these things together, It feels like a pretty massive pile of financial wins that the Trump administration is giving Iran in this negotiation. What do you make of that? It's a little surprising to me, to be honest.

Well, first, this is hardly the first administration to try that strategy. It is based on the concept that Iran fundamentally wants to be part of Western institutions, that it wants to be part of the global community again. And I'm sure most Iranians do. You know, we know that it's a very young population. They want visas. They want to be able to go study abroad. They want to basically do what their peers in many other countries in the region are able to go do.

Mm-hmm.

But that theory has always run into the underlying reality that the country is run by a revolutionary government. And there are many who think that it is their task to complete the 1979 revolution, which is fundamentally based on opposition to the United States. And so the president himself in February, when he was arguing for regime change in Iran, was basically making the case, you can't make a deal like this with the existing government. Right. Today he wants you to believe that we can.

David, we've mostly been talking thus far about the economic payoff, the economic incentives and benefits for Iran in this deal. There are also geopolitical benefits embedded in it. Just walk me through those.

Well, there are two big ones, Natalie. I mean, the first one is the memorandum basically declares what it calls permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon. And that basically is a rejection of Israel's concern about the threat posed by Hezbollah, which is of course the Iranian-funded and aligned militia group that's based in Lebanon. And of course the Iranians wanted that language because now they have a way to pressure the United States over any future Israeli attacks on Lebanon and say they're a violation of the deal.

Right.

But Natalie, you know what strikes me the most about this agreement? It's the stuff that's missing.

What do you mean by that?

Well, think about missiles, right? There's no reference in the entire memorandum of understanding to opening a negotiations about missiles. And yet that was one of President Trump's immediate goals when he announced the opening of a war on February 28th. We heard Secretary of State Marco Rubio come back to it time and time again saying the missile program protected the nuclear program and that Iran couldn't have missiles that can reach Israel. And then yesterday in Europe, the president turns right around on this and says, "Well, of course they need missiles. The Saudis have missiles. They can't be left without the ability to defend themselves." That was not the understanding going in, and that certainly wasn't the understanding you got from Secretary Rubio, who in tweets, in Senate testimony, talked about the danger of their missile program. Right.

Yes, this is a huge pivot, which is, I presume, why you have seen so much anger in Israel specifically over this deal. There's been a ton of criticism.

That's right. This is one of the biggest issues for the Israelis because they're in missile range of the Iranians and the United States isn't. And it's one of the reasons you have seen so much anger from Prime Minister Netanyahu, but not just Netanyahu, about this deal, especially because they feel like they were frozen out of the negotiating process during it. And it's not just the missile issue they're complaining about. There's no reference in the memorandum of understanding that would block Iran from funding Hamas and Hezbollah or other terror groups that have long opposed Israel. Right. The administration says, don't worry, we'll get to that in the later negotiations. But it's not at all clear that they actually will.

And what does the administration say about all this anger from Israel, their primary partner in this war, over these terms?

Well, the most explicit response came from Vice President Pence on Thursday in Washington.

Donald J. Trump Donald Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.

Where he basically said no one has had Israel's back more than Donald Trump.

To some of these cabinet members in Israel who are attacking the president of the United States, the other thing that I would say is that over the last 3 months, 2/3 of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.

That he has saved the country any number of ways.

If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.

The remarkable thing here is that just 4 months ago, we went into this war side by side with Israel.

Mm-hmm.

And we're coming out of it deeply split on the terms to end the war.

Right. This is a very new and confrontational posture toward Israel from the Trump administration. But David, just to step back, I wanna ask about your sense of who actually comes out on top here in this deal, in this negotiation. Obviously the war has taken a huge toll on Iran's economy. On its military. It's caused massive destruction. But does this agreement set the regime up to come out of this conflict in a stronger position? Like, did the regime win?

Well, in the short term, it's certainly weaker than it was before the war. They've lost their navy, their air force, a lot of their missiles. It may take years for them to go recover. But ultimately, there is a pathway here for Iran to become stronger. Now, just because they have the opportunity, Natalie, to get all these economic benefits doesn't mean they actually will. The Iranians have a long record of stepping on their own economic opportunities because somebody somewhere decides to go back to the agenda of making America the primary enemy. And that's always the internal battle inside Iran. But there is no question that they emerge stronger, in part because they survived taking on the biggest military power in the world. I mean, the Iranians knew they couldn't take the US military on frontally. They would've been crazy to do so. Yeah. They set out on a strategy early on of causing so much economic and energy disruption that they believe the United States would be forced to blink first. And when you heard President Trump say the other day that he didn't want to become Herbert Hoover, that he couldn't risk another recession, it must have been heard in Tehran as an endorsement of that strategy.

What about how this leaves us here in the United States? Now that we have the clearest picture of the terms on which this war begins to end, at least, we know that under those terms, the US has not actually achieved any of the goals that it set out to achieve when this war began. So is there any argument here that the US actually gained anything from this? Relative to where we were before this war started?

Going into this war, President Trump said publicly, privately, that he was following the Venezuela model, that he thought he could just decapitate the country, pick up with the existing government, and turn it into basically a vassal of the United States. He didn't get anything like Venezuela here.

Right.

You've heard President Trump say several times that he had bigger plans. He really wanted to go take over the Iranian oil fields, for example, but that the American people wouldn't stand for it. That was his way of saying he couldn't do anything that required a ground invasion. So in this competition in which the US believed Iran couldn't take the pain, And Iran believed the US couldn't take the pain, at least for the early rounds. It turns out it was the United States that needed a way out.

Well, David, thank you so much.

Thank you, Natalie. Always great to be with you.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Ukraine bombarded Moscow on Thursday in what appeared to be the largest drone attack on the Russian capital since the war started 4 years ago. The attack shut down Moscow's 4 airports and part of a major highway. It came after a series of Ukrainian drone attacks on oil refineries and processing facilities, which are part of a campaign to bring the war home to Russians. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement to journalists on Thursday, quote, If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well. Today's episode was produced by Caitlin O'Keefe, Chris Benderiv, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Annie Minoff, Paige Cowett, and MJ Davis-Lynn, and contains music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marian Lozano. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Woods. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitroeff. See you on Sunday.

This week on the Book Review Podcast, we look back at the culture wars of the '80s and '90s with author Isaac Butler.

Culture wars are gonna flare up all the time because the arts are how we decide who we are. That's the terrain in which the soul of a nation is really explored and developed.

Listen to the book review wherever you get your podcasts.