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Biden Cuts Deal With Iran

The Topline: In a highly controversial prisoner swap, the Biden administration has freed $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets and agreed to release five Iranian nationals in exchange for five Americans imprisoned in Tehran.

The Swap

The Biden administration has agreed to a prisoner swap with Iran in a deal that will also unfreeze $6 billion in assets for the authoritarian regime.

Context: The deal, as outlined on Monday, gives Iran access to $6 billion currently in South Korean bank accounts frozen since 2018.

The money is to be transferred to a bank in Qatar where the government will oversee release of the funds for “humanitarian purposes” only.

In addition to those funds, the U.S. has also agreed to release five Iranian nationals from prison in exchange for five Americans currently being held in Iran.

“It’s not a proportionate trade,” Victoria Coates, a foreign policy expert for the Heritage Foundation, told Morning Wire. “What you’re essentially doing there is putting a price on American heads abroad.”

Proponents of the deal say the $6 billion is a lot less than it seems; It was Iranian money to begin with and, they say, U.S. sanctions already make exemptions for humanitarian aid.

But…Coates says the sanctions waiver is nothing more than an accounting trick that the Iranians can easily exploit.

“I’m sure the Qataris will only release it for [humanitarian] purposes,” Coates said, “But what it does is free up $6 billion internally in Iran, which they don’t have to spend on feeding and caring for their people … they can spend it on regional terrorism. They can spend it on their nuclear program. They can spend it on whatever they want to spend it on.”

Remember: President Biden has attempted to cajole the Iranians back into some version of Obama’s nuclear deal for years.

Since Biden took office, though, the Iranians have drawn closer to U.S. adversaries such as Russia and China, instead. According to Coates, the $6 billion sweetener is part of an attempt by the White House to thaw tensions.

But…It doesn’t seem like much detente has occurred. Throughout the negotiating process, American diplomats had to work through foreign intermediaries because Iran refused to meet with them face to face.

The negotiations took place as Iran continues to expand their nuclear program. “They’ve made exponential progress over the last two and a half years,” Coates said. “The notion that they were going to even remotely slow down their progress on [nuclear] enrichment under a Biden administration, in the hopes of getting into a new deal, proved to be absolutely the opposite. They’ve accelerated it.”

And…The timing of the deal was also the cause of controversy.

Congress was made aware of the agreement on Monday, the 22nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history.

Many critics, especially on the Right, were outraged that a $6 billion deal was cut with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and announced on September 11.