Trump claims Strait will be ‘permanently toll free’ under agreement with Iran

Trump also insisted that if Iran failed to reach a final nuclear accord with the United States — a process his aides say they expect will begin Friday in Switzerland — he would restart military attacks on Tehran or make the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20% of the region’s revenues.

In a 28-minute phone conversation that Trump initiated from the White House residence, and a brief follow-up call, the president contended that his decision to attack Iran in late February, and his subsequent naval blockade of its ports after Tehran closed the strait, had remade the Middle East in America’s favor.

Speaking on his 80th birthday, as his family could be heard gathering in the background for a celebratory dinner, he praised two authoritarians — Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia — for aiding in the settlement, or at least not interfering in the blockade of the strait.

“He was a total gentleman,” Trump said of Xi, whom he visited in China last month. “He didn’t send a tanker, along with 20 destroyers on each side of it, to try and break up the blockade,” an act that would have put the Chinese and U.S. navies into potential conflict.

But he excoriated Netanyahu for mounting attacks that nearly derailed the final agreement.

“He’s a very difficult guy,” Trump said of the Israeli prime minister, “and to be honest with you, he should be very thankful to us for doing this. Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours.”

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Trump’s assertion that the United States would, if necessary, become a paid police force for the Middle East would be a striking, if very Trumpian, departure. The president would, in effect, be turning American protection of the region — and the U.S. nuclear umbrella — into a mercenary force, there in return for profit. The arrangement would essentially reject the post-World War II American tradition, in which the United States used its power to assure global peace and prosperity.

It is not the first time Trump has suggested such arrangements in various parts of the world. But pressed Sunday on whether he had won the agreement of Persian Gulf states to such an arrangement — including U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — he did not offer a direct answer, suggesting instead that he had just begun to discuss the issue. It would only happen, he suggested, if Iran remained an adversary.

Trump described Iran’s current leadership, including the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, as pragmatists. It was a vastly different tone from the one he took on the opening day of the war, when he urged the Iranian people to rise up and take over their government once the U.S. and Israeli bombing was complete. He acknowledged that he had said that, but went on to note that the Iranian people did not have access to arms — and would be slaughtered if they tried.

But he insisted that if Iran’s leaders killed protesters, it would prevent them from getting full sanctions relief and access to $25 billion in frozen funds. That requirement, however, is apparently nowhere in the current text of the memorandum of understanding, and it is not clear how central it would be to the next negotiation.

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While the text of the agreement has not yet been published, Trump seemed to be describing Iranian concessions that the country has not yet made, or that have been kicked to the follow-up negotiations. The memorandum of understanding, for example, suspends tolls in the strait for only 60 days, and then promises a regional dialogue about the future. Iran had never charged tolls before the war, so Trump is essentially celebrating a return to the prewar status quo.

Trump repeatedly compared his new memorandum of understanding to the 2015 agreement reached between President Barack Obama and Iran’s leadership, maintaining that his agreement would assure that Iran “cannot develop or purchase a nuclear weapon.” Iran agreed to that when it first ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, and reaffirmed that agreement on the first page of the Obama-era accord.

Over the past three months of negotiations, led by the president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, the Iranians insisted they would never give up their right to enrich uranium under that treaty. Trump said they were still negotiating over whether Iran would suspend its enrichment for 20 years — Trump hinted he might settle for a 15-year suspension, but did not want to negotiate via the press.

He also insisted that Iran would be forever limited to enriching at low levels that “could never be used by the military.”

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“They can never go beyond a certain amount,” he said. But when asked whether that limit was the same as in the Obama-era agreement — which limited enrichment to 3.67%, a level that is usable in power reactors but not weaponry — he said only that the new accord would assure that “they can only enrich for nonmilitary purposes. Forever.”

In both of these areas, Trump appeared to be celebrating Iranian concessions on issues that will be on the negotiating table in Switzerland — as they were in February, when Witkoff and Kushner were conducting negotiations nearly until the bombing started Feb. 28.

But Trump knows that the details will be compared with what the Obama administration negotiated, without launching a war that killed hundreds or thousands of Iranians (and more than a dozen Americans). It is clearly an issue that Trump is sensitive about: Just before calling The New York Times he posted a criticism of Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., for suggesting that Obama got more out of his negotiation than Trump did.

“We negotiated from strength,” Trump said. “He was basically paying them off.”

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Trump insisted, as his aides have, that Iran would receive no relief from sanctions or release of its frozen financial assets until it delivered on its commitments.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.