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00:00I want to bring in another voice now, that's John Feiner, who of course is a distinguished fellow in residence
00:03at the Yale Law School, served President Biden as Deputy National Security Advisor, and was Chief of Staff in the
00:09State Department Director of Policy Planning under President Obama.
00:13John, let me just ask you first of all sort of what you're expecting. You're no stranger to some, it's
00:17like this one, and I'm very curious sort of what you think the agenda is likely to look like here,
00:21how large you think Iran is going to loom.
00:24Well, for one thing, whatever is actually on the formal agenda, President Trump has found a way, as he often
00:29does, to make the summit all about him.
00:31All of the leaders who are present will be focused on whether the Iran war is finally about to end
00:37or whether at least this is the beginning of the end.
00:39This war has done enormous damage to many of their economies, probably more damage to their economies in many cases
00:45than the U.S. economy, even though the U.S. chose to start this war.
00:48And whether or not President Trump reaches an agreement, I think one thing that's important not to forget is this
00:54agreement is likely to have been available to President Trump before he even went to war in the first place.
00:59The other leaders know that. They want this war to end. They want there to be an agreement, but they
01:03aren't, whatever they say publicly, going to feel thankful to President Trump for achieving this milestone.
01:09The war didn't achieve this. The Iranians were making this offer available to the U.S. absent the war.
01:15John, I also want to ask you about, I know it's early and we're basing it on some unconfirmed reporting,
01:20but the outline of this MOU is looking very similar to what was in the JCPOA.
01:27And some of our colleagues here at Bloomberg, I think if we can pull it up, have done basically a
01:29chart that shows where it's similar and where the JCPOA actually had stronger guardrails than what is being proposed right
01:36now.
01:36My question is, is this something that you think, first of all, is durable?
01:41And second of all, you've got the president saying in his very large exuberant tweet that this straight will be
01:46open immediately after this is signed.
01:48Is that realistic? Is that there's a lot of other factors other than the straight being open because Iran says
01:54it is.
01:54We've got mines, as we were talking about earlier, and just the confidence of these shipping operators being willing to
01:59send their vessels and their personnel back into a region when this is a very tenuous deal that is not
02:04necessarily guaranteed to last more than a couple weeks.
02:08So I think the first important thing to bear in mind is this is an area of diplomacy where details
02:13really matter.
02:13We have a president, President Trump, who likes to make big pronouncements, announce frameworks of understanding.
02:20Sometimes they're like a page long without a lot of the details fleshed out or even necessarily agreed by the
02:26two sides when you ask them what they actually think is in the deal.
02:29That won't work in this case.
02:31The Iran nuclear deal that President Obama reached was 120-plus pages long.
02:35It had a lot of technical details about nuclear physics, limits that were placed on Iran's nuclear program.
02:41And importantly, and we haven't heard anything about this in the context of the current deal, the allowance for international
02:46monitors to be physically present in all of Iran's nuclear facilities 24-7 to make sure that they weren't doing
02:52anything that they were not supposed to be doing.
02:54And we know, based on those monitors, based on our own intelligence, based even on Israeli intelligence, that Iran was
03:00complying with the deal.
03:01We don't know if we're going to have that sort of access this time.
03:04So the durability of the deal will depend to some extent on how enforceable it is and how we can
03:09monitor it.
03:10And I think that's going to be quite important.
03:12What you'll probably see announced is, you know, a page, a page and a half where the president says we
03:16have an understanding on big topics and we'll work on all the details over the next 30 days or 60
03:21days.
03:21By the way, after those 30 days and 60 days, all of this could unravel.
03:25The Iranians are very difficult negotiators.
03:28It took us two years to reach all of the different understandings present in the JCPOA, all of the fine
03:33print, not 30 days or 60 days.
03:35And they haven't even really started talking about that yet.
03:38John Feiner, talk to me about sequencing in a deal like this.
03:41And we're using that word a lot to describe what would be in this memo of understanding.
03:44This would have to happen by X date for Y to happen.
03:48Why would have to happen by this date for Z to happen?
03:51And I think that a critic would say by having that unfold in that way, there are ample opportunities here
03:56for the Iranians to bow out of this deal, to push back on the deal, to reopen it, I suppose,
04:01for renegotiation if you want to be charitable about it.
04:04How do you think about sequencing when you're crafting a deal like this one, be it a page long, like
04:09this memo of understanding, or one that's 100 plus pages like the one that you worked on?
04:12So what the president is trying to emphasize, and what we emphasized in the Iran nuclear deal as well, is
04:18that Iran should not get money for nothing, to use the phrase.
04:22Iran should only get paid when it takes steps that it has agreed to take to reduce its nuclear program,
04:27reopen the strait, all of the various things that the United States is seeking.
04:31So we'll have to see how that all works.
04:33But one thing that I think is important to keep in mind, Iran believes it has the upper hand in
04:38these negotiations, believes it could allow the war to continue longer and that the pain would increase on the United
04:45States and on the rest of the world and be more intolerable than the pain that the United States is
04:49imposing on Iran.
04:50So they are not going to end this war without getting significantly compensated for doing so, whether that be through
04:56frozen funds that are currently frozen because of U.S. sanctions being unfrozen and provided to Iran,
05:02whether that be through the licensing of commercial activity that is currently sanctioned for other countries to do business with
05:08Iran.
05:08They're going to find a way to use this deal to rebuild their economy and replace some of the damage
05:14that's been done during the course of this war.
05:15So one way or another, you can guarantee that that will be a facet of this agreement.
05:20The U.S. will try to withhold those benefits until Iran takes the steps that it's agreed to.
05:25There's another element of this, and we've heard from the president over and over again,
05:28that the U.S. is going to go in and get this, what he keeps calling nuclear dust.
05:32And we were in the newsroom this morning, and I was confused by that because we've talked to folks who
05:36deal with this,
05:37and they said that's not the form. It's a gas. It's in these, like, giant scuba tank containers.
05:42So we were looking it up, and, you know, this is something that the president has said and others have
05:48said, but he uses a lot.
05:49I guess the thought is that he's, you know, the U.S. has struck these plants so much that that's
05:54basically all that's left.
05:55Can you talk to us about what is actually left, what form that nuclear material is in?
06:00And we also have these reports from CNN that the Iranians are basically kind of trying to bury these even
06:04further,
06:04so they're getting harder to access.
06:06Is the thought there that they can say to the U.S., they're not a threat anymore, we've buried them,
06:12or that they're so hard to get, the U.S. kind of gives up?
06:15So the president is a lot of things. He is not a nuclear physicist or someone with a deep understanding,
06:21I believe, of how nuclear material works. By the way, on the Obama team that did the Iran nuclear deal
06:27was the Secretary of Energy, Ernie Moniz, who was an MIT professor of nuclear physics.
06:34So we did have that technical expertise in our team, and it actually helped.
06:37It mattered a lot in terms of working out the details. That's not present this time.
06:41I'm not clear. The team that's negotiating this is working with true nuclear experts.
06:47What the president is referring to is uranium that has been enriched to 60% purity.
06:5390% is weapons grade. To go from 60% enriched uranium to 90% is a very small technical
07:00step
07:00that would not take a lot of time, which is why the world and the United States
07:03is so worried about this roughly 1,000 pounds of nuclear material that Iran still has somewhere
07:09that's enriched to 60%. We believe that it's buried in tunnels underneath a bombed facility
07:15in a place called Esfahan. That is where the United States believes this nuclear material is.
07:20And what Trump is demanding is that Iran ship this material out to the United States,
07:24to somewhere else, so that it is no longer physically present in Iran.
07:27It does not seem like Iran has agreed to that. So an alternative to shipping that material out
07:32could be that the material is diluted, the technical term is downblended,
07:36to a lower level of enrichment. That is better than the current state. But it does leave the
07:41material in a condition that Iran could re-enrich it, could purify it again, back up to weapons grade.
07:46It would just take a longer period of time. So that's what's being negotiated in the run-up
07:51to this deal. It does look like that material will stay in Iran, this nuclear dust the president
07:55refers to, to try to make it seem innocuous, which it very much is not.
08:00John, one more question to you before we have to go to our colleague Josh Wingrove,
08:02who's in Geneva. And it has to do with how you're watching all of this unfold. I think Christina and
08:06I
08:06are reacquainting ourselves with all of the semi-official news agencies in Iran that are
08:10reporting on the details of what may or may not be in this deal, how these negotiations are going.
08:16Bloomberg had a piece this week just about the complexity of doing this kind of negotiation
08:20through a proxy like Pakistan, that literally it has to be couriered through Iran. And because the
08:26supreme leader is in hiding, that makes it even more difficult. It takes a much longer time.
08:29You're now out of government, an academician. How are you following this? Who are you listening
08:34to? Give us some counsel on what we should be watching for, because it does seem like
08:37weekend after weekend, there is a routine to the way that we, the media broadly report on this.
08:43The president says one thing, it's usually rosy and optimistic. And then there's either pushback
08:47from the Iranians or nothing from the Iranians. Who are you listening to? Who should we be listening
08:51to for indications that this is in fact progressing?
08:54Look, it's a very important point. And it's one big difference between today and 10 years ago
09:00when the Iran nuclear deal was reached. Now you get three, four, sometimes more versions of events
09:07as they're unfolding. The official White House view, whatever the Iranians put out through their
09:11news agencies, the Israelis often give their own interpretation or version of events. And then
09:16you have the mediators in these talks, Pakistanis, the Gulf countries, trying to put out on background
09:22what they believe is actually in this negotiation. And I think a fundamental problem is you used to
09:27be able to rely on the US government, if not to do the right thing, because people will debate whether
09:32or not the Iran nuclear deal was right or wrong, but it was very clear what was in it. And
09:35we published
09:36the entire thing. It was in all its detail made available to the public so they could assess
09:41and experts could assess. In the current moment, we have not seen a physical document that tells us
09:47what is in this deal. And until that happens, just given the tendency of all of the sides that I
09:51just
09:52described to traffic in disinformation, including, and it kind of pains me to say this, the US
09:57government, we should wait until we see what is actually in the deal if they publish it, if they
10:01publish it. The problem is, as I said at the beginning, this might be a relatively short document
10:06that doesn't have a lot of detail and punts all the hard issues to the talks. And in that case,
10:11we really will not know how this ultimately ends or whether this will be over for another 30 or 60
10:18days.
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