The Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran hands the terrorist regime the one victory it could never have achieved on the battlefield.
Financial reprieve.
What is so disconcerting is that the Iranian regime has never been as weak in its 47 years of existence as it is now.
American and Israeli strikes severely degraded Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and gutted Iran’s military.
A naval blockade choked its ports, with the Strait of Hormuz slammed shut to Iranian oil sales while the US Navy and Saudi and Emirati pipelines quietly moved millions of barrels per day, keeping oil prices from reaching crisis levels.
The national currency, the rial, went into free fall with inflation in triple digits and massive damage to the country’s economic infrastructure that fed its military.
Tehran came to the negotiating table not from strength but out of its desperation to survive.
The resulting MOU seemingly guarantees its survival and grants it the resources to rebuild.
The agreement includes a 60-day waiver that would allow Iran to immediately resume oil exports, followed by broader relief if a long-term agreement over its nuclear program is reached.
Vice President JD Vance promised “significant sanctions relief” and a path to escort Iran back “into the world economy.”
He insisted that “not a single dollar of American money will go to Iran.”
He’s right. But it’s also beside the point.
The danger was never that American money would flow to Tehran.
The risk is that money that rightly belongs to the Iranian people — tens of billions in oil revenue currently trapped abroad and billions more about to be released in new sales — will be transferred to the jihadist fanatics who are holding the nation and the region hostage.
That distinction is everything.
Before the MOU, Iran sold roughly 90% of its oil to Chinese “teapot” refineries — small, cash-strapped buyers operating on steep discounts.
The oil moves. But the money largely does not.
Because of secondary financial sanctions, Iran’s proceeds pile up in Chinese bank accounts — by various estimates presently between 20 and 50 billion dollars — that Tehran cannot freely repatriate or spend.
The regime claws back scraps through costly, opaque shadow-banking networks.
It cannot, however, bring its earnings home.
That trapped revenue is America’s leverage.
Short of a naval blockade, it is the single most powerful economic lever the United States holds over this regime. And it is irreplaceable.
A narrow waiver for oil already loaded at sea — the kind Treasury issued in March — is modest and fully reversible. The barrels complete their voyage and nothing structural changes.
Waiving banking and transport sanctions is an entirely different proposition.
The result would be the normalization of Iran as a participant in the global economy, through resumed trade, monetary transactions, and the transformation of its shadow networks into legitimate infrastructure.
If the administration tears down these protective walls, it will realize soon enough that rebuilding them — which it will have no choice but to do once the nuclear negotiations inevitably fail — is a titanic task.
Tehran’s stated priority is unlocking an initial $24 billion in frozen funds, with claims to more than $100 billion overall.
Surrendering the financial architecture that keeps these funds frozen before the hard bargaining begins is not a confidence-building measure.
It is squandering your best card.
President Trump well remembers President Obama’s nuclear deal more than a decade ago because he withdrew from it in 2018.
That deal similarly normalized Iran’s oil exports, reopened the revenue pipeline, and enabled the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s military budget to jump some 90% in the first year.
The same windfall turned the Houthi paramilitary in Yemen into a strategic missile force threatening shipping in the Red Sea and funded Hezbollah and Hamas’s deadly capabilities.
It took Trump four full years of a grinding maximum-pressure campaign just to mute the effect of the sanctions waivers issued by the Obama administration — proof of how long it takes to rebuild leverage once it is bargained away.
To avoid a Groundhog Day scenario, relief must be sequenced and conditional, tied to verifiable Iranian performance not goodwill gestures.
Tehran is already selling the MOU to its own people as proof that the punishing strikes executed by the US and Israel this year meant nothing.
Every upfront concession validates that narrative, strengthening the IRGC terrorists who insist that closing waterways and issuing threats pays.
Yet Trump still holds the most powerful non-military lever ever assembled against this regime: The mullahs cannot spend money they cannot repatriate.
Let them work for that privilege.
And if they decline to reach an agreement that guarantees the security of the US and its regional allies — as their revolutionary ideology and hatred of the US and Israel dictates that they must — then the mask will have truly fallen.
Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Miad Maleki is a senior fellow.
