MEF Chief Strategist Jim Hanson spoke to FOX News this morning about the details of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Iran and the United States. He highlighted the positive and negative aspects and identified what will happen if Iran is non-compliant.
Transcript:
FOX: Let’s bring in Chief Strategist of the Middle East Forum and former Army Special Forces member Jim Hanson. Jim, thanks for being here with us today. A lot of opinions about this deal rolling in, whether or not it will be successful. Ted Cruz has one. He’s skeptical.
He told the Hill, “history teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea. I think the president is receiving some very poor advice on this deal.”
How do you view what the President, what the United States and Iran have entered into?
HANSON: This is step one. This is not the final deal, as Trey mentioned. And to talk to Senator Cruz, nobody is giving them billions of dollars until they have done the thing the war set out to accomplish. They must give access to all of their nuclear facilities and destroy the enriched uranium that they have to our satisfaction.
You know, this does not, we’re not going to play, oh, Presto, hide-o, oh, don’t go look over here, you can’t look over here.
We need full access to everything We need to witness the destruction of the nuclear material. And then, and only then, does any forward-moving monetary incentives occur. And that’s a pretty big step. If they’re willing to do that, then the war was worth it.
FOX: Yeah, of this memorandum is where it states that the Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop a nuclear weapon. And President Trump has said a few times now that he added that word procure into the deal because he wanted to make sure that Iran couldn’t buy a nuclear weapon along with developing it. But that line that Iran does not want a nuclear weapon is something that the regime leaders have said time and time again when clearly all signs point to the fact that they do.
So what do you think about this? Do you think that the decision makers now will actually fully agree to denuclearize over the next 60 days?
HANSON: I don’t think their desire for a nuclear weapon has changed. It’s a game-changer for anyone. Any nation that gets a nuclear weapon then has leverage on the entire rest of the world.
But we made it too painful for them to continue down the path they were on to developing one. And that’s important.
Destroying all of their conventional military capabilities, but also the blockade shutting off all oil revenue for almost more than a month plus, put them in a position where their economy was about to crash and burn. They can’t afford that.
Now, President Trump has taken domestic political considerations into account And he wants the oil to flow and gas prices to drop because once he’s through the midterms, he’s got even more flexibility if the Iranians do not decide to abide by their end of the deal.
FOX: Yeah, that’s a good point. Everybody talks about what the president is going to do leading up to the midterm elections. There’s also that two-year period after the midterms to consider.
And you mentioned revenue. There’s also the unfreezing of funds as part of this deal. Here’s what the president said about that yesterday.
TRUMP: We have taken a lot of their money. And we have their money. We have taken their money. It’s not our money. It’s their money. And we froze it. At a certain point in time, I guess we’re going to have to give it back. You know, if we didn’t give it back, nobody would ever invest in the dollar again.
FOX: And Iranian officials, though, have estimated they could generate about $10 billion over just a 60-day period from oil exports. How do you think that Iran will use that money? The obvious concern is rebuilding their military and terror proxies.
HANSON: The difficulty for them is they don’t have any factories to build their military back. All of that was turned into rubble. And that puts them on a much longer track to try and rebuild anything. And we’ll be able to see if they’re doing that. We have such visibility into what they’re doing. We can still fly drones. We still have satellite coverage of everything they’re doing.
If they go down the path of rearming in a way that’s dangerous to the future of the region or doing anything at all related to the military or nuclear program that we don’t like, we can end whatever things we’ve already agreed to and resume the pain.
But right now we’re offering them a chance to see, do you want to actually do some negotiation? Do you want to rejoin the community of nations and have some prosperity and security? Or are you going down the path of destruction?
FOX: They give a chance to change their ways and see what happens. They have a chance. 60 days from June 17th, which was yesterday, is August 16th. A whole lot or very little can happen in that time frame. We will all wait and see. Jim, thanks for joining us this morning.
HANSON: Good to be with you.
