All political careers end in failure. All American administrations since Jimmy Carter’s presidency have failed to solve America’s problem with Iran, which is really the Iranian regime’s problem with America, the West in general and Israel in particular.
Vice president JD Vance is the latest American leader to dig his reputational grave in the sand. Partly out of duty to a president who fears being seen as a loser and passed Vance the shovel. But also because of Vance’s own folly.
The second Trump administration tried to cut the Gordian knot by demolishing the IRGC and Iran’s military capacity. Instead, Trump’s team has entangled itself with the Iranian regime like the Obama administration before it.
The 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Trump signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on June 17 grants a lifeline of legitimacy and cash to an enemy that is boxed in and beaten up.
Trump wanted a quick win. He needs the MoU as an exit from an open-ended and unpopular war whose aims are unclear, not least because Trump himself talked up regime change.
The signature at Versailles was written in Trump’s Sharpie. But Vance was the diplomatic messenger who secured the MoU, and Vance is the face of the deal and the negotiations.
Vance never wanted the war, but he followed his leader into it. One Trump loyalty test leads to the next. Vance is now tasked with selling a Potemkin peace that will, as bad deals and delusions do, lead to more war.
Instead of admitting to the American people that any deal with Iran is a triumph of hope over experience, Vance came out fighting – against Israel.
In his media round to sell the deal, Vance covered Trump’s retreat from the war by offering a false choice and a fog of anti-Israel innuendo.
Vance suggested that the MoU’s critics were putting Israel’s interests ahead of America’s and would prefer to drag America into another “forever war” to destabilise the Middle East.
“Do I think there are people in Israeli society who want to turn Iran into Libya, basically a failed state?” he ruminated. “Probably. But I don’t know that Bibi wants that. I’ve actually never had the conversation with him. It would be an interesting conversation to have.”
This is the “just asking questions” style of Vance’s conspiracy-addled friend Tucker Carlson, who, as Donald Trump Jr. boasted, was instrumental in convincing Trump to pick Vance, a freshman senator, as his vice-presidential nominee.
Vance was speaking pure “Carlsonese” when he argued that American supporters of Israel are “always conflating criticism of a particular government with Jew-hatred,” when he advanced the smokescreen that “if everything is Jew-hatred, then nothing is Jew-hatred,” and issued the warning that as “Jew-hatred is pretty bad”, people “should be very careful” about raising accusations of antisemitism “in order to serve a certain foreign policy objective”.
Vance’s press round set up more strawmen than an Idaho potato field. The ploy worked. Instead of talking about the dismal deal with Tehran, Israel’s supporters were forced to push back against Vance’s scapegoating of America’s closest ally.
Vance isn’t just trying to channel the backlash against the deal away from the administration and onto Israel. He’s positioning himself for the 2028 Republican nomination as the candidate of resentment, isolationism, podcast paranoia.
Before then, however, Vance must survive the hall of mirrors. The Republican base isn’t impressed with the MoU. Senior Congressional Republicans are openly appalled.
“Unless you were homeschooled by a day drinker, no one’s confident that Iran is going to do anything,” the Louisiana senator John Kennedy said.
Vance wasn’t homeschooled, but as his memoir Hillbilly Elegy describes, his mother’s day-drinking and drug abuse taught him some early life lessons.
Vance has no experience in any kind of high-level diplomatic negotiation. He appears to be unencumbered by the history of the Middle East. He is about to get schooled by political reality, first abroad and then at home.
Vance’s position now resembles that of Colin Powell in 2003. Powell, an Army general and G.W. Bush’s secretary of state, had misgivings about the war in Iraq.
Nevertheless, Powell pushed claims that Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat and was importing “yellowcake” uranium from west Africa. His president was set on it anyway, and the administration didn’t want to look weak before the American people.
Powell might not have invented the Pottery Barn Rule of foreign intervention (“You break it, you own it”) but he exemplified it. He was tipped as the next Republican presidential nominee, but the souring of the Iraq ended his political prospects.
As soon as the MoU was announced, Trump was joking that if it didn’t work out, he would “blame JD”. JD is covering Trump’s retreat by blaming Israel.
When the negotiations fail, as they will, Vance will blame Israel again. This tactic might help Vance win the 2028 nomination, but it is already splitting the Republican party and the Republican voter coalition. It is also political poison for American democracy.
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