TOI correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump jokingly declared “I’m the boss” as he strode into a G-7 meeting in France on Wednesday amid widespread criticism in Washington that he is being bossed over by Iran in a prospective deal that purportedly lists several immediate US obligations while allowing Tehran to punt the core nuclear issue down the road.Determined to counter the growing backlash at home that the self-proclaimed master negotiator will be signing an MOU that critics say is effectively a “surrender document” that trades American leverage for vague assurances from Tehran, Trump said he is ready to ditch the deal if it does not meet his expectations and resume attacks on Iran. “It’s a memorandum of understanding. And if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them… If they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head, OK?” Trump said during a meeting with Egyptian leader Mohammed El Sisi, amid raging arguments in Washington about whether Tehran had gotten the better of Trump. According to reports from Bloomberg and other outlets, the US -Iran MoU offers what many experts say are “staggering concessions” to Tehran: immediate termination of all US and U.N Security Council sanctions; unfreezing of billions of dollars in Iranian assets worldwide; immediate resumption of Iranian oil exports to stabilize global energy markets; and controversially, creation of a $300 billion “rehabilitation and economic development” fund for Iran – backed by US Gulf partners. In return, it only calls for Iran’s stockpile of near- bomb- grade uranium to be “adequately addressed,” leaving the fate of enough highly enriched material largely unresolved. Analysts say that for a conflict ostensibly launched to permanently neutralize Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, failing to secure this fuel has thrown the strategic success of the entire military venture in doubt.This asymmetric arrangement has forced Trump to battle a growing domestic perception that his accord is, at best, a “JCPOA-Lite.” It is a comparison the president loathes, given his deep-seated antipathy towards Barack Obama, whose original 2015 nuclear pact Trump famously tore up. “They took $1.7 billion… you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama and said he’s a stupid son of a bitch!”* Trump said during the G-7 meeting, using coarse and visceral language to denigrate his predecessor at an international forum and highlight his disdain for the Obama-era diplomacy.Yet, policy wonks point out that Obama’s deal actually mandated strict, verifiable ceilings, limiting Iran to 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, dismantling key centrifuges, and enforcing snap IAEA inspections. Trump’s new MoU, conversely, relies almost entirely on a recycled, boilerplate promise that Tehran “will never produce nuclear weapons,” balanced against immediate and massive American economic concessions.The political crossfire has resurrected long-standing partisan mythology, specifically the enduring Trump canard that the Obama administration simply “gave Iran pallets of cash” as a bribe. The reality of that January 2016 transaction is far more transactional: the $1.7 billion transfer comprised $400 million in principal that Shah’s Iran paid into a US military procurement trust fund prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution; the remaining $1.3 billion was the legally arbitrated interest accumulated over nearly four decades of frozen litigation at the Hague.While the first tranche of $400 million was indeed physically delivered on cargo pallets in non-US currencies (including Swiss francs and euros) because settlement laws prohibited direct dollar transactions with Iran, it was a settlement of an old debt, tied to the simultaneous release of American prisoners. Critics of Trump’s current package note the irony: while Obama returned Iran’s own historical money, the new Trump MoU outlines a pathway for a staggering $300 billion in fresh regional capital injection, albeit via Gulf partners. To counter the growing narrative that they have been outplayed by Iran and “sold Israel down the drain” by pulling American power out of the Middle East and rewarding a hostile regime on vague promises of good behavior, the White House has deployed a high-intensity media blitz. Over the past 12 hours, Vice President JD Vance has assumed the mantle of chief defender, blanketing major news networks from Fox News to NBC, to talk up the MoU against the JCPOA.“If you go back to the Obama JCPOA, what it did was it took an Iranian nuclear programme that it accelerated. It basically bribed the Iranians to stop that programme. Now, the Iranian nuclear programme has been completely destroyed, and what we’re saying is: ‘make the long-term commitment to not rebuild it, and you will get the benefits that come with that’.” Vance said. That confidence is not shared in Congress, where a bipartisan rebellion is brewing, with even Republican hawks, normally unwavering in their defense of the president, breaking ranks over concessions made to Iran. “Unless you were homeschooled by a day drinker, no one’s confident that Iran is going to do anything.” Trump acolyte Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said in his customary folksy way, echoing the growing belief in America that the US President got played by Iran.
