WASHINGTON — The White House vowed “no dust, no dollars” for Iran on Sunday — asserting that unless the Islamic Republic gives up its enriched uranium, it will get no sanctions relief — as President Trump tapped the brakes on forecasting a peace deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump revealed Saturday that the US and Iran were close on a memorandum of understanding that would get oil flowing again while allowing 30 days for nuclear negotiations.
The plan unleashed panic among some Republicans and Israel backers — prompting Trump officials to clarify that no deal was imminent, and that it would take at least five to seven days to finalize any agreement.
Crucially, a senior administration official stressed that Iran would gain little without fulfilling back-room pledges to surrender its enriched uranium.
“Both sides must take their time and get it right. There can be no mistakes!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, Sunday — a day after saying the the deal with Iran was “largely negotiated.”
That still remains accurate, but the last details appear to be the biggest.
“95% is done, but literally changing words requires days of deliberation in their system,” the official said.
The senior source briefed reporters at least twice clarifying that the agreement wasn’t imminent and that there won’t be a repeat of Barack Obama’s infamous 2016 airlift of cash.
“No dust, no dollars — in other words, no highly enriched uranium, then the Iranians aren’t going to get any real relief,” the official told journalists in a morning briefing.
“If they do nothing, they get nothing. If they do a lot, they can actually get a lot.”
The same top Trump official declared in a Sunday afternoon briefing that “we’ll get a better deal” than Obama’s multinational Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) pact, with the new arrangement featuring “clear enforcement, or no deal.”
There will be “no pallets of cash [and] no other relief for opening the strait,” he said.
Republican senators had expressed alarm at a seeming rush to ink a deal and warned that Trump risked repeating the mistakes of the past by walking away from the three-month war without clear terms.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called the potential framework a “nightmare for Israel” and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) saying he was “deeply concerned” the plan would be“a disastrous mistake.”
Under the JCPOA, which allowed Iran to continue some enrichment, “there were pallets of cash, and we did fly $1.7 billion of money from American banks there, and they used it to build centrifuges and finance terrorism,” said the official who briefed journalists.
US and Iranian negotiators are currently discussing an outright ban on enrichment spanning decades, though the precise time period is undecided.
“No one disputes that the stockpiled enriched material will be disposed of. It’s a question about how,” the official said.
“And then simultaneously, while we’re figuring out that question of how, we’re going to have this thing where the strait open, the blockade is lifted and we get the economy some breathing room.”
Trump, meanwhile, invoked Obama’s JCPOA deal twice on social media Sunday — showing he’s well aware how slippery the Iranians are and that he must get much more this time.
“Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet,” Trump wrote.
“So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about. Unlike those before me who should have solved this problem many years ago, I don’t make bad deals!”
How exactly the Iranian regime might dispose of its enriched uranium remained as uncertain as ever — with the senior official saying that “national pride considerations” make it all the more complicated.
“There is a political value in the United States to getting it. There is obviously a political value in the Iranians not handing it over to the United States,” he said.
“A lot of the debate is not really what happens to the stockpiled material. But it’s how the Iranians can sell it to their own hardliners and to their own population in a way that gets us what we need as well, and that’s really the conversation that’s happening.”
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has “signed off on the broad template,” the official said — despite Iranian state media consistently denying US claims that nuclear concessions are being entertained.
Trump last week floated destroying Iran’s roughly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium if it’s handed over, and also recently mentioned Iranian officials saying only the US or China could dig it up from the rubble of Iran’s bombed nuclear sites.
“They will open up the strait in exchange for us lifting the blockade, and they will agree in principle to dispose of the highly enriched uranium, but then there’s a question about how precisely to do that,” the US official said.
The end-game of the nearly three-month war has set off an intense effort to influence the terms, and the official said that the Trump administration suspects that “various foreign actors and sometimes domestic actors try to use selective leaks in order to push certain narratives or to derail certain things.”
“Now, I would say, by and large, most people in the Iranian system don’t love the deal, but they also don’t like the idea of going back to war,” he added.
