While the exact terms agreed upon by Washington and Tehran have not been publicly confirmed by the White House, experts speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Monday gave little weight to claims by the Islamic Republic that the US agreed to hand over $12 billion in frozen assets to Iran before the start of negotiations.
The semi-official regime-backed media outlet Mehr News Agency alleged that Washington had agreed to release the assets, along with an additional $12 billion over a 60-day negotiation period, citing a purported 14-point memorandum of understanding between the two countries.
Maj. (res.) Alexander Grinberg, an Iran expert from the Jerusalem Institute of Strategy and Security (JISS), told the Post that though he gave little weight to the Iranian report, he was somewhat more willing to consider reports that the US conceded more favorable terms to Iran after Israel’s Sunday strike on Beirut.
Israel targeted a Hezbollah command center in the Lebanese capital after a number of aerial attacks were launched by the Iran-backed terror group.
Statements made on Sunday by both US President Donald Trump and Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf suggested that the strike had threatened negotiations.
Iranian officials told the New York Times that the regime didn’t attack Israel in an apparent response to the Israeli military action after Trump intervened diplomatically.
Timing of asset unfreezing matters - expert
Dr. Ben Sabti, an Iran expert at INSS, cautioned the Post against accepting Iranian reports in the coming days, noting that there were already major discrepancies in what was being claimed in the media and what is being claimed by the US, pointing to the fact that Iran has denied the US ended its blockade of Hormuz.
“Until now, not $1 was released,” Sabti stressed, highlighting the fact that such an agreement would require oversight by US Congress and would be quickly jumped upon by the Democrat opposition. “I assess that the Iran regime will become frustrated and begin to withdraw from the agreement, it's a thing that they do all the time, so we will have to wait and see how they destroy their chance, because they cannot tolerate any kind of agreement.”
Shany Mor, senior research fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), told the Post that it was also within the Islamic regime’s established pattern of behavior to use Washington’s relative discretion on deal conditions to publish their “wish list,” presenting it as a list of concrete terms agreed upon.
Mor stressed that the only favorable terms the US was likely to give Iran were those that could be quickly retracted should the regime fail in its promises or in negotiating in good faith.
“It’s important if it’s [the terms] entirely separate or comes with sanctions relief, and it’s important at what stage of an agreement it comes. So if the US is, for example, agreeing to unfreeze assets at the beginning of this ceasefire before even concluding a nuclear agreement that’s quite a bit graver than, for example, something that would be a partial unfreezing of assets conditional upon reaching agreements within 60 days,” Mor noted.
He added that Washington had not been subjected to enough pressure to justify agreeing to the terms published by the Iranian regime, having only been lightly touched by the inflation caused by the disruption to the vital Strait of Hormuz. Though Iran was able to inflict some costly damage on US facilities and interests in the region, which likely “changed the American calculation a bit,” the United States was at no great disadvantage – beyond Iran knowing that Washington had no interest in pursuing a long war.
With the regime on the verge of economic collapse, Mor said that Jerusalem would be disheartened to see the Islamic Republic receive a “lifeline.” “One hopes,” he added, “that the benefit of that, in terms of an agreement or anything else related to the nuclear issue, is commensurate.”
It would be “positive” for both the US and Israel if Washington were able to achieve a “decent” nuclear agreement within only 60 days, though Mor stressed that, “If the agreement is not very good, and the Iranians are getting sanctions relief and an unfreezing of assets, then they’re really just being given a great chance to rearm, rebuild, and continue their investment in proxy networks.”
Menahem Merhavi, a fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told the Post that, even if the terms were advantageous to Tehran, such a “boost” would only help Iran in the “short run.”
“Knowing how the regime mismanages the country, I see no great relief in the long term,” he commented, adding that Iran had more internal troubles to grapple with, and it was too late to buy legitimacy from the Iranian people.
“I see more frustration ahead. They will have no one to blame for the dire conditions of the economy.”
From a Gulf perspective, Bahraini political analyst Ahmed Alkhuzaie, a managing partner at the Washington-based political consultants form Khuzaie Associates LLC, shared concerns that since the “financial injection offers Tehran short-term economic relief, the absence of strict oversight mechanisms raises the likelihood that renewed resources will be channeled into regional influence operations, sustaining networks of militias and proxies across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen,” which will continue to threaten the region.
Alkhuzaie also noted that the Islamabad Agreement relied on delays rather than real resolutions, “leaving the risk of Iran crossing the nuclear threshold intact, and fueling the prospect of a destabilizing regional arms race.”
Though the Israeli experts were fairly trusting in the Trump administration, Alkhuzaie made clear that the Gulf couldn’t afford to rely on “passive observation of deals struck behind closed doors” and argued that regional powers must push to be involved in ensuring “Iran’s regional conduct and respect for sovereignty” is a priority, “not merely its nuclear program.”