In reference to the $400 million returned to Iran as part of the negotiations for the nuclear weapons agreement, Illinois Senate Mark Kirk said:

We can’t have the president of the United States acting like the drug dealer in chief, giving clean packs of money to a … state sponsor of terror. Those 500-euro notes will pop up across the Middle East. …. We’re going to see problems in multiple (countries) because of that money given to them. (Source: Illinois State Journal-Register)

Kirk is only one of many critics of the Obama administration to refer to the payment as “ransom” for four detainees held by the Iranian government.  (NOTE: I’ll let others decide whether calling President Obama “the drug dealer in chief” is a term by which Kirk would never refer to a Caucasian chief executive.)

However, if you think about this event counter-intuitively, you realize the opposite is true.  The United States received the $400 million in 1979 as payment for military equipment ordered by the Shah of Iran.  After Iran’s Islamic revolution and the detention of 40 Americans in November 1979, the arms were never delivered.  One could say the United States was holding the $400 million “hostage” as the monies did not rightfully belong to the American government or the vendors of the military equipment since the order was never fulfilled.  Unlike other hostage situations, the United States did not, at the original time of the taking, make specific demands of the Iranians for return of the 400 million hostages.  Instead they became part of the sanctions regime to discourage Iran from developing and stockpiling nuclear weapons.

To continue with this analogy, one has to ask, “If the money was the “hostage,” who ended up paying the ransom?”  After the Iranian government agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons program and released the four detained Americans, only then did the Obama administration release the 400 million hostages the U.S. had held for 37 years.  Talk about “the art of the deal?”  The United States got two things it badly wanted (a nuclear agreement and the detainees) and used someone else’s money to get them.

I cannot help but believe if a Trump administration had pulled off this exchange, he would be bragging it was the BIGLIEST deal in the history of international negotiations.   It very well may have been.  Too bad the people who actually designed and executed the deal are not given the credit they deserve.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP