Donald Trump stood in the White House this week and told the American people not to worry. Iran's frozen assets, he assured the room, would be used to buy food. American food, in fact, from American farmers. Corn. Soybeans. The regime that has spent five decades funding Hezbollah, arming Hamas, and chanting "Death to America" is, in Trump's telling, about to become a grateful customer at the U.S. agricultural export window.
Iran, for its part, responded with the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug. Iranian negotiators stated flatly that Tehran is under no obligation to purchase American agricultural goods under the existing agreements. The Iranian foreign minister didn't even bother to be polite about it. He was busy announcing that sanctions on oil and petrochemicals were being lifted, the maritime blockade was ending, and the assets were being unfrozen. He did not mention soybeans.
This is the agreement Donald Trump is calling a victory.
Let us be precise about what is actually happening here. The MOU signed between the U.S. and Iran includes provisions allowing Iran's central bank to designate the beneficiaries of the unfrozen funds. Read that sentence again. Iran's central bank, controlled by a regime that the U.S. Treasury has spent years sanctioning for financing terrorism, gets to decide where the money goes. Trump's guarantee that it will go to feed starving Iranians is not in the agreement. It is a talking point, offered to a domestic audience, contradicted immediately by the other party to the deal.
Former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, no hawk by any measure, noted the contrast bluntly: under the Obama-era deal, Iran could only spend frozen assets on humanitarian goods, food and medicine. Under this agreement, there is no such constraint. The money could be used to fund regional proxy forces. When the architect of the original Iran nuclear deal is criticizing your deal from the right on enforcement mechanisms, something has gone badly wrong.
The more revealing detail, though, is not the money. It is what Trump's food-for-Iran narrative tells us about how this administration understands the regime it is negotiating with.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a government that has been brought to the table by the logic of humanitarian need. It is a revolutionary theocratic state that has, for forty-seven years, consistently prioritized its ideological project over the welfare of its own citizens. Iranian inflation was running at nearly 70 percent before the war. One of the largest banks in Iran collapsed, there was a run on banks, the currency went into freefall, and Iranians took to the streets. The regime's response was not to moderate its foreign policy. It was to accelerate its nuclear program and expand its regional operations.
A government that will watch its own banking system collapse rather than abandon its strategic objectives is not going to use a windfall of unfrozen assets to import American corn. It is going to do exactly what it has always done: direct resources toward the instruments of its power.
Critics of the Biden administration's 2023 prisoner swap made exactly this point at the time, including Benjamin Netanyahu, arguing that money is fungible and that freeing Iranian assets in one domain frees up resources to fund terrorist proxies in another. Trump agreed with that argument loudly and repeatedly. He is now making the same deal on a vastly larger scale and explaining, with apparent sincerity, that this time Iran will spend the money on soybeans.
What is most striking is not the hypocrisy, though the hypocrisy is extraordinary. It is the naivety. Trump has spent his political career presenting himself as the ultimate dealmaker, the man who understands leverage and incentives better than the credentialed foreign policy class that failed before him. And yet his public explanation for why this deal is safe rests on the assumption that the Iranian regime's first priority, upon receiving access to billions of dollars in previously frozen assets, will be feeding its population.
The Iranian regime does not think that way. It has never thought that way. Its decision-making calculus is ideological and strategic, not humanitarian. The people running Tehran did not survive four decades of sanctions, assassinations, internal dissent, and now a direct military confrontation with the United States by prioritizing the grocery budget. They survived by being ruthless, patient, and entirely clear-eyed about their long-term objectives.
Trump is negotiating with a government that is all of those things. He is doing so while publicly announcing that he expects them to buy soybeans.
That is not dealmaking. That is wishful thinking dressed up in a press briefing. And the price of that wishful thinking will not be paid in Iowa. It will be paid here, in this region, by the people who have to live with whatever Iran builds next.
