WASHINGTON (AP) — President Trump and Vice President Vance are billing their interim agreement to end hostilities with Iran as a major windfall for American agriculture — but Iranian officials are pushing back hard on that claim, and sanctions experts say they’re left scratching their heads over the specifics.
A preliminary agreement reached last week would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once flowed. The deal would allow Iran to resume selling its oil freely during a 60-day window while the two nations continue negotiating unresolved issues. The memorandum of understanding also included provisions to unfreeze Iranian assets.
The agreement has drawn criticism for not directly addressing the issues Trump cited when the U.S. went to war with Iran on Feb. 28 — including reining in Iran’s nuclear program, its missile capabilities, and its backing of militant organizations like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Firing back at his critics Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump insisted American farmers would benefit directly. He wrote that the U.S. Treasury Department would move Iranian assets “into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran.”
Vance, who discussed the proposal following high-level negotiations held in Switzerland, echoed Trump’s position that any frozen funds held outside Iran would go toward purchasing American crops.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, rejected that framing entirely, saying any agricultural purchases would be driven by “prices and quality” — not conditions set by Washington. “It is interesting that the philosophy and goal of the war, which was the destruction of the Iranian civilization and the collapse of Iran, has become enriching American farmers,” Baghaei said.
Iran’s ambassador in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, also pushed back against Vance’s suggestion that the U.S. and Qatar would have a say in how Iran spends its unfrozen money. “Iran is the only country who decides what to do with those assets,” he told reporters.
Joseph Glauber, a research fellow emeritus at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said it’s unlikely Iran would walk away from its existing food trade partners just because Washington demands it. He noted that Iran’s main agricultural suppliers include Brazil, India, Turkey, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and Argentina. Forcing Iran to buy exclusively from the U.S. would “create some hard feelings with some of our competitors,” he said.
Under previous sanctions frameworks, money that foreign nations paid Iran for imports — such as South Korean oil purchases or Iraqi payments for Iranian electricity — was typically locked in escrow accounts and only released with Treasury approval, and only for “non-sanctionable” goods like food and medicine.
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury approved the sale of Iranian oil, petrochemicals, and petroleum products through Aug. 21. The announcement made no mention of escrow accounts.
Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who worked to build diplomatic pressure on Iran during the first Trump administration, posted on X that he would welcome “a clarification that Iran is actually restricted to only buying U.S. agricultural products.”
Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said the agreement’s actual implications for releasing restricted Iranian assets remain unclear. Nephew, who helped construct Iran sanctions during the Obama and Biden administrations, said via email that the U.S. could attempt to direct the funds: “Well, we can try! All you really need to do is to tell a foreign bank that they can move the money but only to a U.S. bank to buy soybeans or whatever.”
He noted, however, that foreign banks aren’t required to comply — and if they refuse, the U.S. could respond with additional sanctions. Still, Nephew said such an approach is unusual, “in part because we don’t usually like to give the impression that we treat national security issues as a cash grab.”
