Trump’s Iran deal may need him to do the unthinkable

April 23, 2026 — 6:45pm

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Billions in frozen assets may be handed back to Iran. Agreements to limit Tehran’s nuclear program may eventually expire. And some of the same hard-line leaders who crushed nationwide protests in January could end up better resourced than they were before President Donald Trump unleashed crushing airstrikes more than seven weeks ago.

After a decade of fiercely attacking a previous deal with Iran, Trump, pursuing a way out of a war he launched, has authorised US negotiators to consider a bargain that involves many of the same trade-offs one of his predecessors confronted.

Though talks appear paused for now following Trump’s decision on Tuesday to extend the ceasefire indefinitely while Iran comes up with a “unified proposal”, the president will probably face the same challenges no matter when negotiators eventually sit down with each other.

With the conflict on hold, the uneasy truce could solidify. But shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has not returned to normal levels amid a continuing US blockade of Iranian ports and Iran’s assertion of control over the shipping lanes. That has created a drag on global energy markets. Iran retains control over its trove of highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously said is unacceptable.

The price of peace: what kind of deal with Iran would Trump accept?

The potential terms of a deal have Trump making efforts to shore up his hard-line support as Iran hawks warn that the president should not be too eager to strike a deal.

Unfreezing $US20 billion

“‘Pallets of cash’ without the pallets,” Peter Doran, a senior adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, wrote on X, reviving a long-used Republican criticism of President Barack Obama’s Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, to attack the proposals currently under discussion.

Trump and other Republican critics of that 2015 deal have spent the past decade blasting it for handing “pallets of cash” to Iran – a reference to $US1.7 billion that the Obama administration agreed to send to Tehran that was the resolution of a decades-old business dispute. Obama administration officials later acknowledged they hoped the money would ensure the Iranians held to their side of the bargain. Trump pulled the United States out of the........

© The Sydney Morning Herald