Kudlow: US entered Iran MOU too quickly

Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on Wednesday said the U.S. entered its interim deal with Iran too quickly.

“Well, it just seemed to me we were really pulling that trigger too fast,” he said on his eponymous show. “We were letting them sell 50 or million barrels, according to some of the oil traders I talk to. That raises a lot of money … But for what? What performance have they done?”

Kudlow called the memorandum of understanding (MOU), the interim peace deal between both countries that reopened the Strait of Hormuz and lifted sanctions on Iran and unfroze financial assets to the country, “performance-based.”

“I mean, it’s very clear now they are breaking the entire MOU, and certainly the easiest and most straightforward, that being open up the Strait of Hormuz or freedom of navigation,” he continued. “So, I like performance-based, I like incentives a lot, but they did not do anything to earn the money.”

The MOU appeared to be “over” between both countries, President Trump said during a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, saying that talks with Iran were “a waste of time.”

“There’s something wrong with them,” he told reporters at the summit. “They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”

Trump’s remarks and the exchange of strikes between the U.S. and Iran signal the biggest setback for peace negotiations after both countries signed the MOU last month in pursuit of a finalized peace deal to end a war that started Feb. 28.

Attacks on three oil-carrying vessels in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday prompted a response from U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which resulted in almost 90 strikes on Iranian defense sites between Wednesday and early Thursday. Iran counterattacked with strikes toward U.S. bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, which both countries intercepted.

Ebrahim Rezaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian Parliament on national security and foreign policy, warned against Trump’s renewed threat to take over Kharg Island, a major oil depot that holds around 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports.

“Trump has once again spoken of occupying Kharg Island,” Rezaei wrote on the social platform X. “Come on, we’re waiting for you and we promise that not even a single American soldier will return alive.”