The Wall Street Journal reports:

The U.S. and Iran have spent weeks struggling to forge a preliminary deal to end the war. One major reason why they are stuck: Tehran wants early access to cold, hard cash, and it is politically hazardous for President Trump to agree.

For Trump, a decision to free Iran’s assets upfront would inevitably generate comparisons to his own attacks on the Obama administration for flying cash into Tehran in the hours after the nuclear accord was implemented in January 2016. Trump vowed this spring to negotiate a “FAR BETTER” deal than that one, which he spent years lambasting and later pulled out of, partly because it provided cash to Tehran.

During a 2016 presidential debate, he told his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that the Obama administration had made Iran “very powerful with the dumbest deal perhaps I’ve ever seen in the history of deal-making…with the $1.7 billion in cash, which is enough to fill up this room.”

Now he finds himself in a similar pickle, eager to extract himself from the Iran war, which is deeply unpopular in the U.S., and negotiating with a regime for whom swift access to cash is a priority.

Talks have been under way for weeks between Tehran and Washington via mediators, with both sides swapping and rejecting the other’s proposals. Trump continues to threaten to resume the war even as he repeatedly predicts an imminent breakthrough. Sporadic fighting continues.

For Tehran, access to tens of billions of dollars frozen by U.S. sanctions is a critical demand for any deal, offering immediate relief to its deeply damaged economy. Iran wants some $12 billion up front and $24 billion during the 60-day negotiation that would be opened by an initial agreement.

“Twenty four billion dollars is not much for America if he wants to reach an agreement with Iran,” Gen. Mohsen Rezaei, a senior adviser to Iran’s top official told CNN on Friday. “This is our own, not America’s money.” [Continue reading…]