'We are the victor': Iran celebrates deal as Trump stays quiet on details

Iran declaring victory this hour.The foreign minister going on TV tonight to make this declaration.

We are the victor of this battlefield.The Islamic Republic of Iran has emerged as a victor.The Iranian people achieved victory.This is not a slogan.This is no exaggeration.

So that's the sort of propaganda you might expect from the Iranians, but it actually happens to be something a shipping executive I spoke with tonight backs up.The ship's stuck in the strait for now a long time.He told me, quote, unfortunately, the White House, the US are losers.This is both Iran and the United States say that they're close to a deal, an agreement to discuss a deal.except for they are clearly not talking about the same deal.And I'm just going to go through a couple of things really quickly to make the point.

First, the Strait of Hormuz, right?It's closed.A U .S.official said that, you know, in this initial agreement, the Strait would open.And that sounds good, right?

Finally, thank God.Well, Araghchi says it will not reopen unless it is under Iranian management and unless there are fees to transit the Strait.otherwise known as toll or whatever you'd like to call it.But they are both things that Trump has said in the past are absolutely no -goes.OK, so that's the straight.And now what about the thing at the core of all of this, the whole reason that the U .

S.went to war in the first place, apparently, which was Iran's nuclear material?A Trump administration official said Iran's nuclear program will be dismantled and that nuclear material will be destroyed and removed.Araghchi says, well, we'll just keep talking.They will only engage in nuclear talks during a 60 -day negotiation period following the signing of this thing, which is a memorandum of understanding, which means they're basically agreeing to nothing on the nuclear deal, so they say.A senior U .

S.official tells CNN that none of Iran's money is to be released until they perform.This is another crucial thing, right, all that frozen money that you heard about.Remember the pallets of cash that Trump criticized Obama for supposedly releasing to Iran.says, well, actually, there's money here.Twenty four billion dollars is going to be released to Iran, half immediately on signing the quote unquote memorandum.

Erin, I've been talking to White House officials, senior Trump administration officials all day about this.And what they have consistently tried to say is that the Iranians are messaging internally for their own audiences.This is something you heard a senior administration official tell me and other reporters earlier today as well.while they are arguing that.the U .S.

minister saying that they feel like they are closer to a deal than ever before.And I think what we heard from the Pakistani prime minister was really notable as well, when he said that he could confirm that a final agreed upon text for the peace deal had been finalized and they are just working now on the aspect of signing it.

You've been talking to people involved in the negotiations on multiple sides, right?So you've got a lot of incoming here.What are you learning?

So over the last week, the messages sort of coalesced and it's gotten consistent for everybody.So in speaking to regional mediators, the Iranian -backed channel, and speaking to Pakistanis, and also speaking to U .S.officials, it seemed that there was large agreement on most of the aspects of the deal.It was really the sequencing that was the problem, as Elena just laid out.It was the money piece that the Iranians were demanding up front without any concessions, which the administration was balking at, because otherwise it would have been simply returning the Straits to pre -war conditions for money, which essentially would have been looked at as a bribe, which doesn't work.

So the administration wanted more from them up front before they were released.funds and a U .S., senior U .S.official at the Pentagon stressed to me, said, look,

this is absolutely performance -based. ThisThis is going to be much bigger and wider in terms of scope than the JCPOA was.And the Iranians are simply not going to get cash for just returning the Straits to pre -war conditions.And the White House has made a deliberate decision over the past week not to engage in public discussions about what's in the MOU, given that a large part of this has been face -saving just culturally.

Right.You know, what I'm curious, though, Colonel, you know, when Aragi calls this a victory for Iran.I mean, if you take a step back, United States comes at you with fear and fury.they do a lot of damage, okay, a lot of damage.And yet here you are, three and a half months later, you still control the Strait of Hormuz, 70 % of your missiles are still there, you still have your highly enriched uranium, although some of it's probably very difficult to get to because of bombing.So, you know, you look at this and can say, well, all of this for what?

I mean, when you talk about the MOU, memorandum of understanding, there's one thing, you can kind of be vague about a lot of stuff, right?You can be vague about highly enriched uranium.One guy can say one thing, one can say the other.Who's really going to know?But everybody's going to know about the Strait.

Absolutely, Erin.And you know, one of the key things here is that this has to be seen, you know, from a ROCGI standpoint, it is a victory from a strategic perspective.Right.Because we're not going back, you know, as Alex was mentioning, we're not going back to the status quo ante.We're not going back to the period before the war.We're going into something completely new.

And that something that's completely new is actually going to affect way more than just the Strait of Hormuz.Because now what we're looking at is the potential for this kind of control, if you will, from other countries of other straits like the Bab el -Mendeb, so the Houthis could do something similar there in the entrance to the Red Sea.Or, not that they're going to do it necessarily, but pick a place like the Strait of Malacca by Singapore and Indonesia.You could have all these countries trying to exert some kind of control, in essence exacting tolls or service fees or whatever they want to call them over these areas.This is diametrically opposedto the U .S.

S.policy, which was that freedom of navigation would be key through all of these areas.So this is going to have impacts on the economy.This is going to have impacts on a lot of different things, as well as our ability to posture our forces properly.

I mean, Alex, you know, you can use whatever analogy you want.Pandora's box has been opened.The horses are out of the barn.The genie's out of the bottle, whatever it is, right?You cannot go back.You know, we talk about it.

I remember last summer sitting on the Strait of Hormuz when that aspect of the war was happening and saying, well, this is the threat.But they'd never done it.It was a threat.And now it's been done.It can never be undone, right?Things have changed.

They fundamentally have changed, and they've learned progressively over the last year, not only from the 12 -day war last summer, but now from this one.So they started out with a nuclear program that they decided not necessarily to pursue a weapon, but sort of in the background, as a means of strategic deterrence.The 12 -day war taught them that their ballistic missiles could serve as an effective strategic deterrent against Israel.And now in this portion of the conflict, they've learned that low -cost drones and projectiles could hold the straits at risk without actually having to mine them.So they hadn't done it before, but the traditional plans for mining the straits went out the window.Now, if it's rhetoric versus reality and they don't actually control the straits, they say that they control it, we don't recognize it, it's kind of a face -saving measure.

At any point in the future, if they still retain drones or missile capabilities, they could theoretically do this again any time that they wanted to, provided the regime is still in power.

Israel doesn't like this, okay?They don't like the deal.They wanted to get rid of the regime, they wanted to finish the job, and they got Trump on board, and now, the two roads are diverging.But the question is, who's going to call the shots there?Israel has a lot of cards it can play if it doesn't want this deal to go through.For example, continuing to escalate in Lebanon.

There are a lot of things that they can do.So who's really going to end up calling the shots?

Well, it's one of those things where we'll have to see, Erin, because if President Trump has his way,you know, he will be calling the shots.And he's actually publicly said that he is.However, every time he says something like that, the opposite seems to happen.And you've got, you know, someone like Prime Minister Netanyahu, who says, OK, you know, we hear what you're saying.And he gets yelled at by Trump or somebody else.

But he still goes ahead because he's looking at this from a survivability standpoint.He wants to make sure that northern Israel Israel is not going to be attacked anymore by Hezbollah from Lebanon or by the Houthis from, you know, Israel itself, by the Houthis from Yemen.So he's going to look at this as a way of, do I need to do something on my own, which Israel has done in the past, or is it something where I can live with this at least for a time, not to anger the Americans?

Alex, is the United States going to be able to do a deal?I ask this from a very specific perspective.point, which is that the people who have been involved, whether it be Jared Kushner or Steve Whitkoff, they've gone into the meetings.They do not have the knowledge or the capability to do the detailed work required for a deal on specific nuclear points.Experts do that.This administration has not wanted to work with those experts up to this point.

But how do you do a real deal with Iran that can be enforced in any way that's on specific, granular nuclear details without those people involved?

So the Iranians actually complained about that up front because they're used to what they call the Rob Malley detailed technical process in Geneva and they were told by regional mediators and others that that type of negotiation for this administration is out the window.The president values people that he trusts and he wants a strategic framework in place and then he'll sort of get down to the details.What we're looking at here, It looks very similar to Gaza, so let's not forget we had the phase one deal in Gaza that pushed a lot of the difficult issues over into phase two, that still it's overdue now and we haven't finished that.We're looking at an MOU for phase one, that Memorandum of Understanding, that will largely get to an agreement at a high level on the nuclear issues.You need to get rid of that highly enriched uranium.There'll be an overall ban on enrichment for a certain period of time.

But what the details that look like are not going to be very clear.And that's what's going to get worked out in the 60 days.

Well, and that's what's crucial, because by the way, the JCPOA, which is the prior deal, right, also had pauses on that enforcement.All these issues, right, for a period of time, that was the whole point.