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How to read the US-Iran draft agreement: Big commitments from Washington, not from Tehran

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How to read the US-Iran draft agreement: Big commitments from Washington, not from Tehran. Analysis by Brett H. McGurk. Brett McGurk is a CNN global affairs analyst who served in senior national security positions under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Now that the US has released the official text of the memorandum of understanding reached over the weekend with Iran, we can begin to more fairly assess its merits.

From the text, it's remarkable how much the United States is offering for little in return. I've negotiated difficult agreements with Iran and this document stands out in providing Iran much of what it's demanded in the past -- and rarely gotten.

The essence of this memorandum of understanding (MOU) in practice is that Iran gets a lot now, including tens of billions of dollars, in exchange for not shooting at ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Some energy experts have already assessed that this article alone would deliver $60-$70 billion a year directly to Iran. That's $60-$70 billion for doing nothing other than opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war.

As for the nuclear material and the nuclear program itself, those will be adequately addressed in a final agreement. The final text says the enriched material -- in the least case -- would be down blended on site, which walks back Trump's earlier demand that the material must be removed.

This is the much discussed $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran. The language on nuclear weapons is not new, and this MOU pays a lot for Iran to simply reaffirm it. Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.

Trump may have already violated this provision when, at the G7 summit in France, he said today of Iran and future behavior: "If I don't like it, we'll back to shooting at them, dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their heads."

The United States appears to have given away much of its leverage in exchange for opening the Strait of Hormuz. And as those talks drag on or deadlock, the peace the MOU purports to establish may not last.