JUANA SUMMERS: At Tuesday's ABC News presidential debate, former President Donald Trump made a foreign policy claim that caught our ear.
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DONALD TRUMP: Iran was broke under Donald Trump. Now Iran has $300 billion because they took off all the sanctions that I had.
SUMMERS = HOST: In other words, Trump says the Biden administration's policies led to a windfall for Iran. We asked NPR's Jackie Northam to see if that was true.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: First, a bit of background - when then-President Trump took office in 2017, he wanted to make good on a campaign pledge that he would back out of a nuclear deal with Iran that had been hammered out by the Obama administration.
SINA TOOSSI: He imposed what he - his administration called the so-called maximum pressure campaign, very stringent economic sanctions.
NORTHAM: That's Sina Toossi, an Iran specialist at the Center for International Policy. He says Trump's economic sanctions had an impact.
TOOSSI: Trump's economic sanctions on Iran hurt the Iranian economy and hurt various key economic indicators affecting Iran's population and its overall health of the economy.
NORTHAM: Not quite broke as Trump claims, but foreign reserves plummeted, inflation went up, and the middle class shrank. Richard Nephew, a former Iran and sanctions official in the Biden administration, now with The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says Iran's economy is still hurting because the Biden administration has kept the pressure on.
RICHARD NEPHEW: When Trump said, they took off all the sanctions we had in place, I just want to be very clear - that is factually inaccurate. The sanctions that were in place in 2020 when Trump was president remain in place today. There are, in fact, more designations in place today.
NORTHAM: But over the years, Iran became skilled at working around sanctions, says Sina Toossi.
TOOSSI: Iran has also grown more sophisticated with sanction circumvention, especially in terms of oil exports, and especially with China.
NORTHAM: And the Biden administration eased up on enforcing many of those sanctions during the first couple of years in a bid to lure Iran back to the nuclear deal, especially on oil exports, Iran's main source of revenue, says Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. He says China is Iran's largest customer.
BEHNAM BEN TALEBLU: We have done some estimates that I think within the first year and a half to two years, if I'm not mistaken, they were able to sell about, you know, just under 100 billion. They could be a little bit higher depending on how you see some of the accounts that Iran had and some of the waivers, for example.
NORTHAM: But Ben Taleblu says Trump's claims that Iran made $300 billion isn't out of the realm of possibility. Trump also said the October 7 attack on Israel would never have happened on his watch because Iran wouldn't have had enough money to supply Hamas or other militant groups with weapons. Richard Nephew disputes that.
NEPHEW: If you go back 40 years, during the Iran-Iraq war when the Iranians were as broke as they literally could ever be, they were still supplying arms to Hezbollah.
NORTHAM: And will likely keep supplying proxy groups, whoever's in the White House next. Jackie Northam, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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