After two years of negotiations, the U.S. and Iran solidified an agreement in September to swap prisoners and allow Iran to access $6 billion in frozen assets.
The deal was met with some support — proof that adversarial countries can reach an agreement — but also a fair amount of skepticism due to perceived enabling of an antagonistic country.
For its part, the White House defended the move as a step toward reuniting families. “The president is making five families whole again,” a White House official told reporters following the official swap of the five American prisoners, plus two family members, and five Iranian prisoners who had been charged or convicted of nonviolent crimes.
The Biden administration also suggested that the deal is part of its larger policy and intent to curtail Iran’s nuclear program. In June, the administration announced it was trying to reach an agreement with Iran in which the country would reduce its uranium enrichment levels in exchange for increased sales of oil to the U.S. Some supporters of the prisoner swap argued that the exchange could, in fact, help solidify such an agreement.
“The deal is an important stepping stone,” Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a U.K.-based international affairs think tank, told Time. “It reinitiated indirect bilateral dialogue between Tehran and Washington, and it sets the ground not only for the release of American hostages held in Iran for far too long, but also for discussions to contain Iran’s advancing nuclear program.”
Critics of the Biden administration’s recent agreements and policy toward Iran, however, argued that there is no guarantee that the country will uphold its agreement to deescalate its nuclear program and has already barred some United Nations inspectors from monitoring its nuclear sites.
The European Union (EU) issued a statement of concern in September following a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran had withdrawn permission for IAEA inspectors to monitor and verify its nuclear program. “The EU urges Iran to reconsider its decision without delay,” it said.
Meanwhile, critics of the hostage deal specifically pointed to the potential dangers of giving Iran access to $6 billion, which was money owed to the country from South Korea for the purchase of oil before the U.S. had imposed sanctions on such purchases in 2019. As part of the prisoner swap, the released assets were earmarked for humanitarian purposes only, but skeptics argued that there was no way to truly track how Iran used the money.
Some even argued that while the $6 billion might be used for humanitarian purposes, the inflow of cash could free up other money for the country to spend on weapons or use for other adversarial means.
“The U.S. should be unrelenting in its efforts to bring detained Americans home, but Iran will now count pallets of ransom money, putting its leaders in a better position to develop a nuclear weapon and fund terrorists,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) wrote on Facebook. “And the price to release U.S. hostages will only go up.”
Former President Donald Trump, who is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, called President Biden “dumb” for releasing the funds. “This absolutely ridiculous $6 billion hostage deal with Iran has set a terrible precedent for the future,” Trump wrote in a post on the social media site Truth Social. “Buckel [sic] up, you are going to see some terrible things start to happen.”
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken defended the move to unfreeze the assets, which he clarified as Iran’s “own money” and not U.S. funds. “We’re very confident that the Iranian funds that had been made more easily available to Iran as a result of the actions that we’ve taken will be used exclusively for humanitarian purposes,” Blinken told reporters. “And we have the means and mechanisms to make sure that that happens.”
Other Biden officials told reporters that the U.S. Treasury would be monitoring the funds and, if not spent on humanitarian needs, the U.S. could freeze the money again. In a September interview with NBC News, however, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi told NBC News that Iran will spend the $6 billion wherever it is needed.
“Humanitarian means whatever the Iranian people needs, so this money will be budgeted for those needs, and the needs of the Iranian people will be decided and determined by the Iranian government.”
The U.S. and Iranian prisoners were officially exchanged in September, and the Biden administration is likely to continue its work toward deescalating Iran’s nuclear program.
For more background, see the November 2015 issue of Congressional Digest on the “Iran Nuclear Deal.”
