Trump's crypto dealings and potential conflicts of interest

In the four months since the US and Israel initiated their ongoing joint military campaign against Iran, the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iranian leadership to end the war have been predictable in their unpredictability.

On Monday, President Trump said US officials would meet with Iran in Qatar the next day. Iran said that no negotiation meetings were scheduled. (They ultimately conducted low-level talks on Wednesday.) Both countries have launched strikes despite signing a memorandum of understanding on June 17 that included a ceasefire and was designed to help bring an end to the war. But, despite the US celebrating a security deal between Israel and Lebanon last week, Israel has continued strikes on southern Lebanon and Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, rejected the Israel-Lebanon deal, which it was not a party to.

According to data from multiple Iranian government ministries, as of June 10, about 3,500 people have been killed in Iran since the war began. Lebanon’s health ministry reported on Wednesday that about 4,300 people have been killed in that country.

All to say, as I wrote shortly after the memorandum of understanding was signed, the Iran war doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon.

“I think Iran was very open to a potential arrangement that was stronger than the JCPOA.”

Nate Swanson, a resident senior fellow at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council, spent nearly two decades as a State Department official, most recently as the Biden administration’s director for Iran at the National Security Council.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, Swanson told me, took a wrecking ball to many of the US’ already tenuous relationships in the region, and made a region-spanning war with Iran much more likely even before 2026.

I spoke with Swanson last week about what could be next for US relations with Iran, Israel, and the Gulf states.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Given how the second Trump administration has handled relations with Iran, I was curious what you think a different negotiator could have gotten out of this situation.

I don’t want to say the US-Iran relationship has ever been good in my time working on this، for almost 20 years, but I think Trump walked into a situation in 2025 where Iran was in a historically bad spot.

They just had these two direct exchanges with Israel. They had no air defense. Their proxies at the time seemed like they were much weaker. Domestically, they had very acute economic and environmental crises. They had also come off massive protests in 2023. So I think Iran was very interested in the deal right there.

I think they approached negotiations not sure what Trump wanted to do. I was there, and I wasn’t quite sure what Trump wanted to do, but I think up until the June 2025 war, the US had a great hand in terms of leverage. And I think Iran was very open to a potential arrangement that was stronger [in restrictions] than the JCPOA. After the 12-day war though, it’s been a declining chance for a real deal and certainly US leverage. Iran knew that more war was coming and that was where their focus was.

“The US doesn’t seem interested in complicated deals, and [now] I’m not sure Iran is willing.”

I’m curious if you think the Biden administration would ever have launched strikes against Iran like those last June and this February, or how you think they would have handled the aftermath.

Yeah, there’s no way those strikes would have happened.

To some extent, you had a path that was drawn with October 7, 2023. For Israel, that was a game-changing event. They went after Hamas and Hezbollah, and both of those, from their military perspective, were relatively successful. You had conflicts with Israel and Iran directly for the first time in October 2024, right before the election.

I think the priorities in the Biden perspective was one, to make sure that Israel and our Gulf allies were protected. Second is to, wherever possible, deter escalation. We were very clear that we were not going to support larger escalation, while Israel definitely was considering a larger war at multiple points across 2024.

[The June] 2025 and 2026 [wars] would not have happened at nearly the same level if it had not been Trump. Netanyahu has been pushing some form of an Iran war forever. He’s Mister Iran. And the major difference between Trump and any other administration before him, including Bush, Obama, and Biden, was that [the Israelis] were always told no, and that we weren’t going to support [a war]. Trump said yes, and that is fundamentally the difference.

How has the US’ ongoing role with the war in Gaza changed its relationships with the Gulf states?

[The US had] a pretty strong relationship with all the GCC members [Gulf Cooperation Council, constituting Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates].

Prior to [October 7], there was a movement to normalize relations between Israel and the rest of the Gulf. It has been a long-standing goal across multiple administrations, and Trump [partly] did it with the Abraham Accords.

But it was happening without a solution to the Palestinian issue. We were able to do it with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, and Biden spent a lot of time trying to facilitate Saudi-Israel normalization.

It went out the window on October 7, especially from the Saudi perspective. Bibi was willing to prioritize his number one objective to have this military conquest in Gaza.

But the relationship [with the Gulf states] has been shifting significantly forever. A significant moment in our history was when the US pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018. Iran responded by attacking the Gulf, which was a harbinger of what happened in this war. So the US pulled out of the JCPOA, put maximum pressure on Iran, [which] attacked oil tankers [in UAE waters] and Saudi energy infrastructure. This was the [2026] playbook, at a much smaller scale.

For the first time, you saw [Gulf states] try to de-escalate with Iran. There was a recognition that we weren’t going to be there for them in the way they hoped. The relationship has been slowly evolving through then, and then we put on turbo burners during this war, where the US relationship with the Gulf became a liability. If [a Gulf state] had a real US base, not only did it not protect, it encouraged attacks.

Recent reporting suggests that the US may effectively be returning to aspects of the JCPOA, such as JD Vance saying last week that Iran agreed to nuclear inspections. If the current negotiations come through, do you see the JCPOA-era relationship as partially restored?

Yes, in the best-case scenario; but ultimately, no. I don’t think we’re going to get the bigger phase two deal that the MOU outlines. The US doesn’t seem to be interested in complicated deals, and I’m not sure Iran is willing to do a big deal with Trump, just and uniquely him.

I also think you can’t recapture what we did in 2015 with the JCPOA. The JCPOA was done to stall out Iran’s nuclear program at that moment in time. But you can’t turn back time. Even if Iran agreed to all the Trump administration requests of no enrichment and getting rid of all the stockpiles of enriched uranium, the time it would take Iran to break out for a weapon is about half the time it was under the JCPOA.

Iran has learned so much about the process, specifically their ability to install vastly more technologically efficient and proficient centrifuges and to install them a lot faster. It’s like six times stronger centrifuges that can install at three times the speed.

And those [demands from the US] aren’t going to be met, so I think we are in a significantly worse off position.

What were the years under the Biden administration, after the US left the JCPOA, like regarding relations with Iran? I know Iran had resumed nuclear enrichment at that point after the US had reinstated sanctions.

Under past presidents, the Israelis “were always told no…Trump said yes, and that is fundamentally the difference.”

Different Biden officials have different takes on this. My opinion is that there was a deal achievable but there were a few mistakes made on both sides, but more on Iran’s.

Iran expected, when Biden came in the door, to immediately indicate a desire to get back to the JCPOA as quickly as possible. We were slow; it took us a month. There was a conversation that happened both inside and outside the government about whether you should go back into the JCPOA directly or a deal that could be hypothetically more sustainable. At that point it was clear that Iran wanted a clean return to the JCPOA. By early April, the US had put together a comprehensive return to the JCPOA.

But at that point it was too late for Iran. While I think their negotiators wanted a deal, they had elections coming up a couple months later and their Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] didn’t want the outgoing administration to get credit for it. So as much as we were trying to move forward a deal, they couldn’t say yes.

The new [Iranian] team came in and spent three or four months getting their act together and eventually decided that they wanted to get back into the JCPOA too, basically under the exact same terms. A deal was possible, but Iran thought that the longer they held out, the more we would give them. And so they kept stalling and pushing for more and more.

The Russia war broke out [in which Iran backed Russia], and then Iran went through massive protests. By the end of fall 2022, a return to the JCPOA wasn’t viable politically and timing-wise. And in the midst of all this happening, there were significant advances made in the nuclear program.

So the deal was less valuable than it was in 2015, and even as it would have been in early 2021.

I do think they wanted to get to yes, but they never could.

Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal meant economic sanctions were put back on Iran. How do you think that played into the events you mentioned during the Biden administration?

By the time Trump left office in his first term, you had a significant increase [in sanctions] under “maximum pressure.” For instance, the key part of JCPOA sanctions relief was delisting their central bank, their shipping sector, their oil sector, etc. All that got re-sanctioned not only when we pulled out of JCPOA, but then they also listed this vital JCPOA sanctions relief as terrorism. That complicated any potential deal.

But I think the bigger difference is oil. Obama signed language that reduced Iranian oil, but it was capped to not destabilize oil markets and it was agreed on with other countries. I think Trump’s approach was that no one can buy any Iranian oil. The net effect is everyone went down to zero eventually but China. China ended up buying the Iranian exports at that point and has ever since. China has become a beneficiary of the system and has basically kept Iran alive because they’re not adhering to the US sanctions.

Is there a good way to understand how the US leaving the JCPOA impacted Iran’s economy and the global oil market?

“You [now] have to have something that seven people agree on…I think that’s why you see this MOU is in Iran’s favor, because they couldn’t say yes to anything less.”

Oil exports are the best number. Pre-JCPOA they were doing about a million barrels a day. During the JCPOA, they’re at max capacity over two million barrels a day. And then under Trump’s maximum pressure, including during COVID when [production] went away, it went down to a couple hundred thousand barrels a day. It’s been creeping up ever since, including through [the second] Trump [administration]. They are now doing 1.7 million barrels a day, all that illegal, all to China, and at a discount. Iran has figured out how to evade sanctions and how to get oil to China.

As a part of this [2026] deal that we signed, Iran could sell all the oil again with no repercussions for the first time since the JCPOA. They will now be able to recruit new purchasers who used to buy Iran oil, like Japan, South Korea, and India would be the biggest.

How do you think the re-implementation of US economic sanctions in 2018 affected the negotiations under Biden?

It definitely made it harder. It added layers of complexity that were time-consuming and difficult to figure out. You basically had to go through one by one and say, “is this actual, real terrorism or is this [an additional terrorism designation from] Trump’s sanctions?”

Some experts I’ve talked to have emphasized the 1953 CIA-backed coup in shaping Iran’s attitude to negotiating with the US. What do you think about that?

It’s very much in Iran’s political ideology and statecraft. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was founded on anti-imperial and anti-US ideas that came out of 1953. They view the US as supporting Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, and it’s just one living continuous piece of history that hasn’t ended. I don’t know if that’s wise or not, but I think it’s reality.

There is no trust on either side. I think the difference between now and the JCPOA, though, is at least there was a desire to try to work through the mistrust to get somewhere that’s mutually beneficial. I am not sure that environment exists at all anymore, and I think it’s evidenced by the fact that Iran won’t sit down with the US directly. It has to be with an intermediary or a mediator in the room or just not at all. They’ll only pass messages right now through Qatar or Pakistan.

And it goes both ways. When I started at the State Department in 2007, the door across from me had a sticker of an American flag and the inscription was like “save our hostages” from the hostage crisis. There’s still these survivors of this hostage crisis left over. There are still victims of Iranian violence and terror around the world, through Hezbollah or others.

It goes both ways, and the level of mistrust and animosity has got to be an all-time high coming out of this war.

The US and Israel’s bombing campaign has killed a lot of Iranian officials. Do you have any idea who is negotiating now, and if they have any different priorities?

I’m not really sure of the answer. On one hand, the foreign ministry guys are the same, they’re not dead. So the foreign minister and [longtime] lead negotiator [Abbas Araghchi], and his surrounding team have been around, with a minor blip from 2021 to 2024 during the Raisi presidency, since 2013.

To your real question of who’s making decisions, I don’t know. We knew before the Supreme Leader [Ali Khamenei] died that it was him. We don’t even really know if the Supreme Leader’s son [Mojtaba Khamenei, who was elected after his father’s assassination] is alive or not. We know the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the Iranian armed forces accountable only to the Supreme Leader] has a bigger role than they have in the past, but we don’t really know what that means. There’s a new lead negotiator, the Speaker of Parliament [Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf]. There’s clearly five, six, probably more, people who are making decisions in a collaborative manner.

It’s much more complicated than the JCPOA. You have to have something that seven people agree on to get to yes. I think that’s why you see this MOU is in Iran’s favor, because they couldn’t say “yes” to anything less.

I do think it reflects the correct desire by the president to get out of this war, which is a debacle and getting worse. But the terms are terrible, and it’s like the ultimate indictment of the war itself.