U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said he’s confident that a peace deal with Iran will be signed on Sunday.
“I’m confident, the team is confident,” Mr. Waltz said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
“Again, I’ll let the final details be announced by them. I don’t want to get ahead of the president or the vice president, but they have every intent of getting this done today.”
President Trump said the U.S. and Iran could reach a deal to end the roughly five-month conflict on Sunday. The deal would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and give both sides 60 days to discuss the future of Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr. Waltz said the details in the memorandum of understanding, which outlines these conditions for a deal, will be “worked out as we go forward into the next round of negotiations.”
He added that the frozen Iranian assets set to return to Iran under the peace deal “will not be upfront cash, so to speak, that we saw in the Obama deal,” he said, referring to President Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a deal that sought to end Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.
Mr. Waltz said there were “massive loopholes” in the Obama deal that will now be closed, adding that “no one on this team is just going to take the Iranians at their word.”
“This is all about verification and there are huge gaps in the JCPOA and the Obama nuclear deal in terms of actually verifying what we know,” Mr. Waltz said. “We know the Iranians have tended to cheat on in the past, there were not ‘any-time, anywhere’ inspections of their facilities. The Iranians could delay things; they could choose which list of inspectors they accepted or not.”
Mr. Waltz said Iran’s leaders are “incredibly difficult negotiators,” adding that they are “having a very hard time getting guidance from their supreme leader.”
“And I just can’t over-emphasize our Gulf allies –– the Kuwaitis, the Bahrainis, the Qataris, especially the [United Arab Emirates] –– are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us,” he said. “The Iranians have shown their true colors and I think they’ve made a massive strategic mistake by attacking its allies and its neighbors the way it has.”
Iran’s state media has said it’s unlikely that a deal could be reached Sunday, but it could be coming in the next few days.
“We must wait for the exact timing of the agreement’s signing. It will NOT happen tomorrow, but it could take place in the coming days,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei told Iranian state media on Saturday. “Due to the other side’s inconsistency, we must remain cautious in commenting on the process.”
