Listen, my children, and you will hear about an arms sale gone bad thanks to a revolution in a nation far away.

Way back in 1979 the Shah of Iran had been buying conventional weapons from the US by the boatload. He had spent as much as 4.45 billion dollars in 1977 on F-14 fighter jets, tanks, trucks, and other military hardware. In 1978 the figure dropped to $2.1 billion, probably because Iran was in turmoil, with its people demonstrating against the Shah and his rule all year long. The citizens were upset at the widening gap between rich and poor, the appearance of all oil wealth flowing to the Shah and his family rather than to the people, and they didn’t like increasing secularism.

The Shah fled in January of 1979 and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in February. He’d been in Paris, but he hadn’t been there long. He’d been living in Iraq until 1978. As part of the revolution Khomeini cancelled all deals with the West, including arms purchases. Iran had made payments for some of the weapons it now couldn’t buy, but when some of its students took the inhabitants of the American Embassy hostage on November 4, 1979 the US President immediately issued an Executive Order freezing Iranian assets in the United States and placing sanctions on the country’s economic activities with US entities.

That’s the source of the $400 million that is suddenly in the news. It was payment for arms which were never delivered. While the US was negotiating with the Iranians about the nuclear deal and about the return of four Americans Iran had been holding on what the US considered spurious charges, the Iranians understandably asked for their money to be returned to them. President Obama said today “It was the assessment of our lawyers that there was significant litigation risk and we could end up costing ourselves billions,” Obama said. “Their advice was that we settle.”

I’d say paying only the principal amount of $400 million rather than principal and interest accrued since 1979 probably saved the United States a billion dollars or even more. Despite what nitwit Trump says, that looks like a pretty good deal to me.