New York Times: President Trump said the United States would resume bombing Iran if he did not like the preliminary agreement, hours after leaders from the Group of 7 nations called the deal a “breakthrough.”…
Read the 14-point draft agreement between the US and Iran
Given both the US and Iranians’ secrecy around the language, it remains unclear whether the draft text shared with CNN will reflect the exact wording of the final document due to be signed in person on Friday in Switzerland. Technical details are also being finalized so the wording could still shift. A White House spokesperson said the text did not reflect the actual memorandum…
‘Humiliation’: Donald Trump battles claims his Iran deal is worse than Obama’s
US president’s critics ask if concessions to Tehran in purported agreement were worth four months of war…
G7 leaders voice ‘support’ for US-Iran agreement as draft text obtained by CNN
Iran will be able to export oil as soon as its agreement with the US is signed, according to a draft copy of the document obtained by CNN, which also states Iran will “never produce nuclear weapons.” The signing will kickstart a 60-day window to negotiate the technical terms of a lasting deal…
Trump Is Losing the Hawks Who Once Defended the Iran War
Many of the conservatives who cheered on the president worry that the peace agreement doesn’t go far enough to deter Iran…
Trump says US will not invest in $300bn fund for Iran
Speaking at the G7 summit in France on Wednesday, the US president said that reports that such a fund would form a central pillar of a deal struck between Washington and Tehran last weekend were “false”.
“We’re not putting up 10 cents,” Trump said, adding that “we are not investing in it and we do not have a fund”.
He also denied that he had asked Gulf countries to create one…
Iran deal includes $300 billion fund, more than half of which already committed, source says
A $300 billion private fund designed to trigger investment into Iran is outlined in the U.S.-Iran framework agreement and more than half that sum has already been committed, a source with direct knowledge of the deal told Reuters.
The fund is designed to give both sides an economic incentive to conclude a final deal to end the war, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not yet been announced as Washington and Tehran prepare to sign on Friday…
Vance, the face of deal to end Iran war, defies hawkish GOP critics
Hawkish Republicans have directed their ire more toward Vance than President Donald Trump, despite Trump and Vanceboth having signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran on Sunday. They’ve suggested the vice president’s influence is part of the reason Trump’s earlier objectives in Iran are unlikely to come to pass…
Has Trump achieved his goals in the war with Iran?
Netanyahu, Israel’s arch-survivor, set to face voter fury over Iran deal
Opinion polls put his right-wing coalition on course to lose but, in a parliamentary system he has dominated for long stretches since the 1990s, few Israelis would entirely discount him weaving together a new government…
This time, Trump and Netanyahu have really fallen out
Rarely has a geopolitical roll of the dice gone so rapidly wrong. Netanyahu played on Trump’s vanity to help convince him to start this war. That same vanity will now be deaf to any future bridges Netanyahu might try to sell. The Israeli leader thus faces an unpalatable choice. Either he submits to a deal that leaves Iran considerably stronger than it was before February 28, or he breaks with the US by trying to scupper the deal. There is little scope here to split the difference. Netanyahu has the 60-day US-Iran negotiating period to figure it out…
Obama’s Nuclear Deal Looms Over Trump’s Iran Negotiations
President Trump is under pressure to significantly improve upon the Obama-era deal in order to justify the huge human and economic cost of taking the United States to war…
Declaring the Strait of Hormuz open is easy. Restarting shipping traffic is not.
The path to resuming traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is long, complicated and risky…
How Trump sidelined national security experts ahead of his war with Iran
Instead of using the council to draw on input from a vast federal network of experts, Trump has leaned on a small group of close allies, such as national security adviser Marco Rubio and envoy Steve Witkoff, when debating strategy for the war. That has presented challenges for military planners, who were kept at arm’s length from pre-war discussions before being abruptly tasked with moving US assets to the Middle East, CNN has reported…
See Where Iran’s Billions of Dollars in Frozen Assets Are Held
Estimates of how much Iranian assets abroad are worth vary, with Tehran saying it is at least $100 billion. Other experts put it much lower. Tehran’s priority is to unblock an initial $24 billion in phases…