Who is to blame for the collapse of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Trump administration and the terrorist regime of Iran?
Was it the Iranians whose repeated and predictable violations of a ceasefire that never happened culminated with attacks on shipping in the Gulf and on infrastructure in the Gulf states, and on an American base that left two American servicemen dead and many more wounded?
Or did Israel sabotage the MOU and drag America back into war?
This is the line Vice President JD Vance took in a rambling three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan on July 15. It defies facts and reality. But that’s no obstacle in the age of digital politics.
We’re used to Rogan rambling on in a cloud of weed smoke and “just asking questions” about the weird and the wacky. But no one forced Vance to join him. No one forced Vance to indulge his speculations. No one forced Vance to add a few of his own.
Vance joined Rogan’s podcast a week after Trump called Iran’s leaders “crazy”, “scum” and “sick people”, and dropped negotiations and the MOU as “a waste of time”.
Vance was the face of the negotiations and the MOU. He negotiated the deal with a little help from his friends in Qatar, Pakistan and Turkey, as well as Trump’s lawyer Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Witkoff and Kushner stayed in the background while Vance tried to explain to the American people why the Trump administration had switched from bombing the mullahs to love-bombing them with $300 billion and sanctions relief – far more generous than Barack Obama’s Iran deal.
Republican senators criticised the deal as a sell-out. Democratic senators ridiculed the administration’s lack of consistency. Israelis and conservatives warned that Iran was playing Vance for a fool.
No one forced Vance to sell it the way he did. His promotional tour of the TV studios to sell his second autobiography turned into a promo campaign for a bad deal that the Iranians killed off before the ink was dry.
It was a hard sell and a long shot. Anyone who’s read a history of the region knows that Iran’s leaders cannot be trusted and that they see America as an existential enemy.
No one forced Vance to insist that the deal was great. No one forced him to start his press tour with Megyn Kelly, the ex-Fox talking head turned anti-Israel conspiracist who is the poor woman’s Tucker Carlson.
No one forced Vance to tell CNN’s Jake Tapper that in his vice-presidential opinion, it was “cool” that the Iranians had dropped their hostility after 47 years of “Death to America”.
No one forced Vance to tell Israelis to shut up when they warned that the MOU was a fool’s errand, and to threaten that they risked losing the protection of “the only powerful ally” they have.
When Joe Rogan suggested that Jeffrey Epstein was “Mossad”, Vance didn’t disagree. But no one forced Vance, who has called himself “one of the O.G. Epstein conspiracy theorists”, to muse about Epstein working for “Mossad or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country”, then say there were “no documents” to confirm it.
Vance is meant to be the Vice President of the United States of America, not the Vice Podcaster and digital vibemaster. If he believes that Epstein “clearly had connections to the upper levels of American intelligence” and “the highest levels of Israeli intelligence”, he should show some receipts.
When Rogan asked about the failed MOU, Vance dodged the blame with similar conspiracist thinking about Israeli influence.
“I’m very frustrated by the Americans and, frankly, by people in other countries who are, like, ‘You cannot negotiate with the Iranians,’” Vance told Rogan.
This is strawman stuff. No one said don’t negotiate. But they did say that a bad deal would never work. And they said that not because they were being paid by Israel, but because it was obvious.
Instead of admitting his error, Vance blamed Israel and its backers.
Vance claimed that “certain elements of the Israeli government” are “manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely”. Before and after the signing of the MOU in mid-June, he said, the Israelis ran a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal.”
Vance’s evidence for the claim that Israel is dragging America into permanent war? A Time magazine article that, Vance said, described a “literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing.”
But the Time article didn’t say that. And no one, Vance included, has offered any evidence to support his claims.
The Time article describes how in September 2025 the Israeli government hired Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s 2020 election campaign, to lead a social media campaign with the goal of combatting online antisemitism and Israel’s loss of popularity among young Americans, especially on the right.
Time didn’t claim that Vance’s Iran negotiations and the MOU were a target of Parscale’s programme, which launched months before the war.
There was nothing secret about it, either. Parscale kept his work above board by registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. And he’s adamant that the campaign had nothing to do with the MOU.
“I have never funded, organised, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump – ever – including his MOU or ceasefire proposal,” Parscale told Time. “The claim that I am coordinating an effort to prolong the war is completely false. The only people manufacturing a conflict between President Trump, Israel and me are anonymous officials using background quotes to make me the bogeyman.”
What is going on here? Vance is typical of the kind of American conservative that Parscale’s efforts were meant to reach. He distrusts foreign wars. He comes from a white working class that feels, entirely reasonably, that it’s been discriminated against and demonised for years. He’s soaked in the right’s version of identity politics and victimhood. He’s heavily online. He assumes that a hidden hand is behind anything he dislikes.
Temperamentally, Vance is attuned to the younger minority of MAGA Republicans. He never wanted a war with Iran, but he’s gone along with Trump. It’s what a loyal Vice President should do. It’s what the presumptive Republican nominee for 2028 has to do. But the more Vance does Vance, the narrower his path gets. After his Joe Rogan podcast, Ken Griffin, one of the major Republican donors, was rumoured to have ruled out donating to a Vance 2028 campaign.
Vance is joining the long list of those who’ve been burned by Trump. Trump is out for himself, and he’s a gambler. He’s playing two hands against Iran. One, fronted by secretary of war Pete Hegseth and secretary of state Marco Rubio, is the strategy of force. The other, fronted by Vance, Witkoff and Kushner, is the strategy of negotiation.
This double-track play is how the Iranian regime always negotiates. It makes it likely that Trump will come out ahead one way or another. But it’s making Vance look like a fool. It’s also making Marco Rubio look statesmanlike, because Rubio was the consistently sceptical voice.
Someone must be to blame, and Vance is determined that it won’t be him. But no one forced him into this position. It’s a reflection of who he is, how he thinks and how he reacts under pressure.
Meanwhile, the Israelis want their money back. Parscale, a nameless Israeli official told Time, was “supposed to make things better”, but Parscale didn’t deliver. “We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse.”
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