Donald Trump faces bipartisan criticism over his provisional deal with Iran, with concerns about concessions made to Tehran. Meanwhile, Vice-President JD Vance praised progress in peace talks held in Switzerland.
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US political figures from left and right voiced fresh objections on Sunday to Donald Trump’s provisional deal with Iran – even as the US president made fresh threats while Vice-President JD Vance hailed progress during the first round of direct peace talks in Switzerland.
Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who recently lost his primary battle for re-election, posted a line on X from a Wall Street Journal article on how rogue regimes evade US economic warfare. It said: “Iran’s ability to withstand sanctions so far exposes a hard fact for Washington: economic pressure has largely failed to cow rogue regimes, as they game out more ways to sidestep US restrictions.”
This amplified remarks from two days ago where he said he had hoped that before striking a deal that involved releasing restricted Iranian funds that the US would have “finished the job” and eliminated Iran’s hostile nuclear capability, warning that “now they will use that money … to replace their ballistic missile assets and begin to enrich [uranium] again and that’s going to be a continuing danger.”
On Sunday morning senior Democratic figure Susan Rice, a domestic policy aide to Joe Biden and former US ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser under Barack Obama, added to her recent description of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the US and Iran as a “jaw dropping, horrific surrender” by Trump, by calling it “flimsy” and “egregious” because “so many concessions were granted up front”.
Rice told ABC News This Week that the concessions to Iran in the MOU, signed by Trump in Paris last Wednesday, “wouldn’t normally be, and shouldn’t have been, granted until after there was not only a fully comprehensive deal to, at least, deal with their nuclear program, but also that those provisions that were negotiated had been agreed”.
Rice pointed to a provision in the document that, chiming with Cornyn’s remarks, showed Iran “is now able to sell all of its oil and all of its oil products on the market unimpeded, and use that money to rebuild itself” ahead of any agreement on the nuclear issue.
The bipartisan criticism came as Trump threatened to renew military attacks on Iran if it didn’t cooperate and rein in its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, including a forcible takeover by the US of control of the shipping channel.
Critics, including Senator John Cornyn and Susan Rice, argue that the deal grants excessive concessions to Iran without ensuring a comprehensive agreement on its nuclear program.
JD Vance is the Vice-President of the United States, and he praised the progress made during the first round of direct peace talks with Iran in Switzerland.
Susan Rice described the memorandum as a 'jaw dropping, horrific surrender' and criticized it for granting concessions to Iran before a comprehensive deal was finalized.
Critics, including Senator Cornyn, claim that Iran has managed to evade US economic sanctions, highlighting the failure of economic pressure to curb its actions.
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Rice said the previous deal with Iran negotiated by Obama when he was president and then scrapped by Trump during his first term did not lift sanctions on Iran until there was full agreement on a deal, not just an MOU prior to a full pact.
Rice also said that Obama’s condition for Iran having access to frozen assets was that they could only be spent for humanitarian purposes, while under the Trump MOU is unrestricted.
The New York Post tabloid, owned by the Trump-boosting Rupert Murdoch, published a withering editorial using the glaring headline: “With Strait of Hormuz held hostage, Trump’s Iran deal is worse than Obama’s”.
Rice’s comments came as Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, rejected an invitation to offer Trump credit for ending the war.
“That’s like literally an arsonist starting a fire and getting credit for running out of the burning building. This president has led this nation into a disaster. We have surrendered our power,” Booker told NBC’s Meet the Press. “We have capitulated to the enemy. And they now are mocking us”.
Booker said that under the memorandum of understanding “Iran gets all of the benefits, literally billions and billions of dollars” and called it “an abject surrender”.
As the first round of face-to-face US-Iran talks in Lake Lucerne in Switzerland wrapped up late on Sunday morning, Vance said that negotiators had “already made great progress over just the last few hours, and I expect that we’ll make additional progress in the hours to come”.
Regarding Israel’s continued military operations in Lebanon, Vance said “these things are always a little bit messy … but I actually feel great about where we are in Lebanon. There’s still some additional wood to chop, but we’re going to keep on working.”
Last week Ted Cruz, the Republican senator of Texas, said Trump was getting bad advice on Iran.
“History demonstrates that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is an exceptionally bad idea,” he said.
Meanwhile the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday that the Lucerne talks would “set out what the Iranian goals are and what they think the tradeoffs they might have to make are.
“We’ve just never been in this situation before,” he said. “The US military, both in the actions to destroy the Iranian military capabilities and to force a way through the strait of Hormuz, without any dialogue, have just put the Iranians in a massively different situation. They don’t have the leverage they’ve always had in talks before,” he said.
Wright declined to predict when US consumers would see a return to pre-war gas prices in the US. “They will continue to head down,” he said. “Flows of oil and natural gas through the strait have already returned to normal, and they will continue that way, whatever happens with the negotiations with the Iranians.”