President Joe Biden’s apparent agreement to unfreeze more than $6 billion of Iran's funds in exchange for six American hostages could inspire more “kidnappings and shakedowns,” according to a senior House Democrat.
“We generally have a policy not to do this,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), a frequent Biden ally, told reporters while traveling in Israel. “It’s hard to think that it does not incentivize criminal activities to profit from them.”
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Hoyer, long the top lieutenant of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, aired that misgiving amid sharper denunciations leveled by Republican opponents and even a former Iranian hostage who characterized the agreement as a dangerous ransom. United States officials and Biden’s allies sought to blunt some of those criticisms by emphasizing that the funds will be placed in “restricted accounts,” but his Iranian counterparts called that into question with a triumphalist account of the agreement.
“The decision on how to utilize these unfrozen resources and financial assets lies with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the Iranian foreign ministry said Friday. “The competent authorities will allocate these resources to address the various needs of the country.”
That assertion contradicts Secretary of State Antony Blinken's stated confidence that the agreement, which affords access to billions of dollars that have been frozen in South Korean banks, would fall under a humanitarian exception to U.S. sanctions on Iran.
“In any instance where we would engage in such efforts to bring Americans home from Iran, Iran’s own funds would be used and transferred to restricted accounts such that the monies can only be used for humanitarian purposes, which, as you know, is permitted under our sanctions,” Blinken told reporters Thursday at the State Department. “There’s an exemption for humanitarian [purposes] that’s there from the start.”
The deal this week comes in the wake of a U.S. decision to permit Iraq to pay “about $2.76 billion in gas and electricity debt to Iran,” an agreement that likewise was described as including a requirement that the money go to accounts “requiring U.S. permission for Iran to get access to them and only for spending on humanitarian goods,” as Reuters reported in July.
“That's the Biden illustrations or teaser or goodwill gesture for Iran to move forward with [this] deal because,” Xiyue Wang, an American graduate student at Princeton University who was detained from 2016 to 2019 in Iran, told the Washington Examiner.
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The agreement is intended to secure the return of five Americans who have languished in Iran for varying numbers of years; one detainee, Siamak Namazi, was seized by Iranian authorities in 2015. Their plight is just one set of controversies in a U.S.-Iran relationship fraught with Western anxiety about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and partisan U.S. disputes about the merits and demerits of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which was negotiated under Barack Obama and exited by Donald Trump in 2018.
“We have to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear weapon nation,” Hoyer said, per the Jerusalem Post. “They have shown that they are continuously inclined to use international criminal efforts to get their way and are looking for hegemony in the Middle East.”