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At NYTimes.com/gift. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams and this is The Daily. After days of promising that a ceasefire was near,
President Trump late Sunday announced he had reached a deal with Iran.
Today, David Sanger, who spoke to the President, explains what is and does not include it in the agreement
“and how much closer it gets both sides to ending the war for good.”
It's Monday, June 15th. David Sanger, thank you so much for joining us. Rachel, great to be with you. It is 8 p.m. in New York, it's after what I am in London where you are right now. So, thank you for making the time.
Tell us what you know about this very late breaking deal with Iran. Rachel, as you know, this deal has been brewing for a long time. And it's been subject to a lot of up and down negotiations between Iran and the United States. Even as the war went from active combat to a ceasefire to that flare-up that we saw just in the past week when the U.S. resumed bombing of Iran for several days.
And we fought for a while, but that might kill any hope of having what they just agreed to on Sunday night, which is a preliminary memorandum of understanding. That's really all they've done here and agreement to reopen the strait to end the blockade of Iran. And to begin a serious conversation about the nuclear program. And in the end, the United States and the Iranians all determined it was in their interest
to do that, to end the fighting and get back to the talking. And David, you actually spoke with the President. Tell us about that conversation. I did Rachel, it was a little bit of an unexpected call. I'm here in London as you said, and around 430 in Washington, about 930 here,
the President called to talk about the deal that he put together and to celebrate it, to argue that it was much better than what President Obama had negotiated in 2015, a negotiation that I followed closely at the time.
And a deal that the President ripped up in his first term.
We should remind listeners, ripped up in his first term, criticized harshly, and has criticized again even on Sunday because he's very sensitive about the argument that some Democrats have made and many nuclear experts have made that he hasn't gotten as much yet from the Iranians as President Obama did, and of course, President Obama did not resort to war. So the call was mostly to make the argument that he'd gotten something big here, something that
remade the Middle East and something that will make the entire region and Israel safe from an Iranian bomb in the future. I should note David that one of the reasons this call, at least the surprising to me, a little bit, was that it was not that long ago that you were on Air Force One, and the President said that you're reporting on the war was treasonous.
Hey, well, Rachel, what can I tell you? It's a hazard of White House reporting. He was reacted badly to a series of news analysis that made the point that he had not yet accomplished his political objectives, you know, including ending the Iranian nuclear program, and he still hasn't.
“But I think he wanted to try to make the case, because I think he cares about what the times”
reports that he was on the road to something that he believes will be better than the Obama deal. It'll be a while before we know whether that's the case. I think another takeaway from the fact that he called you despite how angry he was with you quite recently is that this deal really matters to him. We have talked on the show about how much the President has been looking for an off-ramp to this war, and I just sort of wondered given all of
that, if you can tell us a little bit about what his mood was like, did he seem, I don't know, victorious at all? He sounded celebratory, and he clearly thinks that he has found his off-ramp.
Now, let's remember Rachel that when he went into this war, the straight-of-w...
was open, and it was running toll free. One of the things he wanted to tell me was that he believes
under this agreement, Iran will never impose tolls again. Of course, the agreement itself,
we believe we haven't seen the text of it, only refers to suspending tolls for the next 60 days. He also told me that he was convinced that Iran would comply and reach the next stage agreement
“on the nuclear court and talked about specific provisions. But we have to remember, he hasn't”
negotiated any of those positions yet with the Iranians. And he said that if Iran didn't complete that deal, he would either resume military action or begin to have the United States patrol the Gulf in return for 20% of all the revenues, presumably mostly oil revenues, that are received in the region. That's a very different use of American power in the Middle East. It's also very Trumpian, right? So he was trying to make the case that the United States was not only recovering,
not only had the blockade work and the bombing work, but that he was on the way to remaking the region. Right, to your point, the threat of demanding 20% of a country or region's revenues seems like a very difficult thing to calculate, let alone in force. But just to summarize, the points that he did say to you seem to be things that we've heard for a while. He is reopening the state of Formus. There will be no tolls. There will be a 60-day ceasefire this lifting of the blockade on
Iranian ports. Have we heard from the Iranians in all of this? Like, what is the status of actually
“signing on the dotted line for all of the parties involved?”
As of the moment when we're speaking, neither party is talked about actually signing this agreement, although we're told that there will be, if there hasn't already been an electronic signing, think a docu-sign for an international agreement, and then on Friday, in Switzerland, a more formal signing that presumably will include face-present trade events. And that would probably be the beginning of the negotiations for the next phase.
But what was unusual about the president's call is that has he described and walked me through the nuclear agreements that he believed they were going to reach, many of which we've already
written about in the past few days. He was basically describing agreements that he wanted to
make sound as if they had already been reached. But when pressed, acknowledged that this is all
“subject to this later and in my view, much more important document, which would be much more like”
what the Obama administration negotiated 11 years ago, specifics about whether or not Iran can enrich uranium, whether it has to give up its stockpile of nuclear fuel and so forth. Okay, David, so a lot of unknowns is your explaining to us. Was there anything else that struck you about the call or the deal or anything else? Well, one of the things that I thought was surprising about the conversation was that the president went out of his way to praise two authoritarian leaders
who we didn't think had a whole lot to do with this final deal, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Xi Jinping of China. And he praised them for essentially not getting involved.
He was mildly critical of the Europeans for offering to help only after the fighting ended,
and he was deeply critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel who went to extraordinary lengths to try to keep this agreement from coming together. We'll be right back. I'm Jonathan Knight, and I'm the general manager of New York Times Games. If you play our games, you probably know there's something a bit different about them. Just like there are writers behind
the articles you read in the times, there are creators behind our daily puzzles. Traci Bennett curates the day's world of solution to keep it lively and varied. When a Lou creates each
Connections board including all those categories that try to stump you.
every last letter word and pangram and spelling bee so that loyal players of all skill levels
“enjoy it. Our puzzles are human-made every day with the standards you'd expect from the New York”
Times, and this matters because when you choose to spend time with our games, it should be time well spent, solving puzzles that are challenging, surprising, and joyful. Puzzles hand-crafted for you. We think that's something worth investing in and something worth paying for. David, we have talked a lot on the show about how even though the United States and Israel started this war together, their interests have pretty quickly diverged. We've seen that play
out in the negotiations in recent days. We've seen that play out during the course of the war.
Can you tell us a little bit more specifically about how Prime Minister Netanyahu has been a stumbling block to this deal that we saw announced on Sunday? Or Rachel, when the history of this war is written, the dynamic between the United States and
“Israel is going to be one of the most fascinating chapters. You will remember that it was Prime”
Minister Netanyahu who made the case that if the US and Israel attacked Iran together, the country was so fragile that the government would probably collapse in about three days and that it would be taken over by forces that Israel and the United States would be able to control. And it was at that time that the President said to some of my times colleagues in other conversations, this is going to be like Venezuela. And the only peace deal that he would
be interested in, he said toward the beginning of the war, was an unconditional surrender by Iran. But as the war got more and more complicated and as the President needed a way out of a conflict in which there was going to be no quick victory and certainly no unconditional surrender,
“he and Netanyahu began to separate. And they separated in large part over Netanyahu's insistence”
that he continued the attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Because the Iranians began to make the case that the only ceasefire that they would sign would be a whole regional one that would also call off Israel's ability to attack Hezbollah. Now if you ask American officials around the President, that didn't mean that Israel couldn't defend itself if attacked by Hezbollah. But the splits you've seen in the past few weeks have all been over Netanyahu's insistence that he was going to
finish the job and crush Hezbollah in Lebanon. Right. Israel does not want to be forced into an agreement that prohibits them from attacking what they see as an existential threat. That's absolutely right. And so they did not want to agree to any kind of accord that would put limits on their own military activity or even their ability to strike Iran at some point in the future. This agreement is supposed to be a regional agreement and includes a commitment that the U.S. would not re-attack
Iran and presumably that its allies would not as well. So this turned into some screaming fights between Netanyahu and Trump, details of which began to leak out. And the conversations didn't get any easier and the President told me he had really hard conversations with Netanyahu in the past 48 hours after Israel attacked Beirut and other parts of Lebanon. David did President Trump
tell you what argument he is using to push Netanyahu to fall in line? Well first he told me that Netanyahu
was a very difficult guy, even while making the case that the President's a long time supporter of Israel. But the President cast himself as the one who had Israel's long-term interests in mind more than Netanyahu did. He said to me, to be honest with you, he should be very thankful for us for doing this because Iran had a nuclear weapon. Israel wouldn't be around for two hours. Did the President tell you why he thinks that this time will be different? Like why Netanyahu
will listen to him and not continue attacks against Iran and its proxies? He didn't. And the Israelis had made it pretty clear that they're not going to be bound to an agreement to which they weren't a party. They weren't involved in negotiations. And yet the Iranians are making the case that this
Agreement applies not only the United States, but to all of its allies.
Israel's ultimate guarantor of security is the United States and its ultimate supplier of arms
“is the United States. And while the President has never threatened to either one of those,”
you can imagine that amidst what we are told are cursing matches between these two pretty strong world leaders is the underlying threat that if Israel doesn't go along, the United States's commitment
may in some ways weaken. And we know that the President in recent weeks has basically made
the case to Netanyahu that he's lost a generation of Americans whose views of Israel are nowhere near what they were in President Trump's generation. That is really interesting. And I feel like I should pause here because I want to remind people that this is at the end of the day, not a formal peace deal. Right? Everything we're talking about is a memorandum of understanding. So it's essentially an agreement to engage in further talks. And I wonder, David, you are a White House correspondent,
you are a national security expert. So given all of what you have reported so far on this war,
“how durable do you think this agreement actually is?”
You know, I think this is as durable as each side ultimately decides to make it.
The fact of the matter is that a memorandum of understanding doesn't have any particular enforceable capability. This isn't a peace deal, as you said. It's not a nuclear deal. It's more like a table of contents as one of the President's aids put it to me for what needs to be negotiated next. Now it does have a couple of more specific limitations. For example, it says in the memorandum of understanding that Iran is going to have to rid itself of its nuclear
stockpile and begin to blend that down to a form that can't be used in nuclear weapons.
But it's a long way from that general statement to saying, "Who's going to dig this out from
under the rubble in Iran? Who's going to go melt it down and who's going to have possession of the nuclear material later on?" So it's not really an enforceable document. And it's very possible that the Iranians think this is all they need to get through two and a half more years of the Trump administration and that they'll worry about the next steps, which will be lengthy and difficult to execute when they see who's the next president.
David, you have made the points to us before on the show that the demands from the White House about what they want in order to reach a ceasefire have shifted or what their goals are for this war have shifted such that what we might actually see if this war ended is simply a return to the status quo before it began. Now that you've spoken to the President and given what you know about
“what might be included in this deal, I just want to ask you, has your assessment shifted?”
It hasn't shifted much, Rachel. In the course of more than four months of war, we certainly have seen the eyes stayed succeed at destroying a good deal of Iran's missile capability, not all of it, but a good deal. It has indeed sunk the Iranian navy. There wasn't much of one, but it's gone. It has certainly wiped out what was left of the Iranian Air Force. But this agreement largely gets us back to where we were before the war started, which is to say, with the Strait
of War moves open, assuming it happens as the President describes and expects, without a blockade of Iranian ports, and with an negotiation over the nuclear program, resuming in Switzerland. Now, it does raise one interesting question though, Rachel. While the President said to me that he wants to make sure the nuclear material that's in Iran gets dug up from beneath the rubble of the facilities that were attacked a year ago by the US Air Force, he didn't sound like he was
in a huge rush. And he thought that the United States could keep an eye on it, that from satellites and from other means, we can make sure the Iranians don't use it to produce a weapon. But if we don't have an urgent reason to get it out, it does raise the question, why did this war happen to begin with? Because the overarching justification for the war at the time was that Iran was just weeks or months away from being able to build a weapon.
In other words, did we need to have these three months of violence and incred...
Or was there another way to get to where we find ourselves today?
David Sanger, thank you so much. Thanks Rachel, great to be with you. We'll be right back.
Here's what else we need to know today.
“For the first time in 53 years, the New York Nicobockers won the NBA Championship,”
beating the San Antonio spurs in game five of the finals on Saturday night. The next one, the series four to one after trailing by double digits in each of their victories.
Twice mounting seemingly impossible comebacks.
“They were led by the incomparable Jalen Brunson, a six foot two guard who overcame and outplayed”
the tallest man in basketball, Victor Wembanyama, to give New York the title and to bring Marcus a beauty enjoy to a city where many people had lost hope of seeing this particular hometown victory in their lifetime.
“Today's episode was produced by Mootsady, Alex Stern, an Adrian Hearst,”
who was edited by Michael Benoit and Patricia Willens. contains music by Lisa B. E. T. and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderley and this episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow. This week on the Wirecutter Show, we're going to have a new noise canceling earbud pick.
It has a fantastic noise canceling microphone like magical. We're taking your questions about headphones ear buds over ear, Bluetooth, phone conduction. Lauren Dragon, long time headphones writer for Wirecutter, answers it all with her expert recommendations. Find it wherever you like to listen.
