Less than three months ago, Donald Trump was mocking the 2015 deal Barack Obama made with Iran that cleared the regime’s path to a nuclear bomb.
“They sent Boeing 757s over there, loaded with cash, hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Trump, referring to the cash ransom Obama aides delivered directly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC, to bribe the Iranians to agree to the phony deal. “That’s not going to happen with Trump.”
And yet it seems that’s exactly what’s happening with Trump.
According to reports, the United Arab Emirates, a key US regional ally, is making $20 billion of frozen Iranian assets available to the Islamic Republic, with $3 billion of it having already been delivered to Tehran, perhaps by a Boeing 757 and maybe even on wooden pallets like those Obama stacked with cash to pay the terror state.
Emirati officials deny that they’re buying off Iran on behalf of the United States, but if Abu Dhabi thought Trump was going to put the clerical regime down for the count, it wouldn’t be giving money to a neighbor that since March has set fire to high-end real-estate properties with hundreds of missile and drone attacks.
Instead, the Emiratis are paying tribute to the side that looks like a winner.
Thus, it seems that what Trump has frequently called the worst deal ever negotiated, and has identified for more than a decade as Exhibit A in the case against American loserdom, has now become the pattern of his own Iran policy.
And, like Obama’s, the plan is to gorge the IRGC with money and pave the way to a nuclear bomb while restraining Israel from responding to missile attacks by Iran and its proxies for the sake of what it euphemistically calls regional order.
What seems to have held Trump back from green-lighting the memorandum of understanding (MOU) that Vice President JD Vance has negotiated with Iran is his fear that he can’t repackage Obama’s deal as his own big geopolitical win because his base will see through it and think him a loser.
And so, for nearly a month, Vance, leader of the White House’s “restrainer” faction, has been trying to convince Trump that MAGA is definitely dumb enough to be suckered into believing that the Iran deal his loyal deputy has captained is a historic win.
Vance is happy to be celebrated by his online friends as the man who stopped the neocon war for Israel, but he doesn’t want his name publicly attached to the deal in the event the Iranians or his boss blow it up. So he briefs the press on background, asking that journalists attribute the information regarding the MOU he’s been negotiating to a senior administration official.
Last week, the “senior administration official” held a call with reporters to say the deal is close at hand — or nearly, as he bragged in a May call with the same media cohort. Ninety-five percent done. He was short on details but assured his captive audience that Iran had committed to dismantling its nuclear facilities, destroying and shipping out its stockpiles of enriched uranium and giving up its regional terror proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis; in short, Iran was conceding to every US demand.
And, the vice president repeated frequently, the Iranians would only be paid when they were in compliance. And to cover all the bases, a strict verification regime would be put in place to make sure Iran was abiding by the deal. After all, neither he nor the president is naive about Iran.
Vance’s validator calls with the press, influencers and think-tank experts constitute the centerpiece of his communications campaign, which is modeled after Obama’s Iran deal echo chamber but with one big difference. The Obama team set up its comms infrastructure to steamroll Iran deal opponents, like US lawmakers, nuclear proliferation experts, Republican voters and pro-Israel activists. Vance’s only audience is Trump.
By generating positive articles, social media posts and TV appearances celebrating Vance’s hard-fought progress in bending the Iranians to his will, the vice president is amassing evidence to show Trump that his supporters are 100% behind the president’s new policy of accommodating Iran — Obama’s policy.
In the call Friday, Vance explained that his working theory of Iran is that the regime’s moderate faction is ascendant, and the way to empower them is to make concessions to them so they can show the hard-liners, the IRGC, that they can deliver the goods to the Iranian people.
The schematics sound familiar because it’s exactly how Obama sold the Iran deal.
“The people most opposed to the deal are the Revolutionary Guard,” Obama said in 2015, “hard-liners who are implacably opposed to any cooperation with the international community. And there’s a reason for that, because they recognize that if, in fact, this deal gets done, that rather than them being in the driver’s seat with respect to the Iranian economy, they are in a weaker position.”
Did that work? No, the money Iran won from Obama’s deal went to the IRGC. A fact sheet released by the first Trump administration in May 2018, when the president withdrew from what he then called “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” showed that with the money from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the IRGC “funded a military buildup and continues to fund its terrorist proxies, such as Hizballah and Hamas.”
So how would it work differently now?
Because we’re not naive, Vance told the media. The difference between Obama’s deal and the deal Vance is trying to get Trump to sell to his base is that the Iranians get things for performance, and, said the vice president, if we don’t see that performance, then Iran will not get any of the economic benefits of this negotiation.
Thus, what most distinguishes the MOU from the JCPOA, Vance insists, is that the Iranians won’t get paid up front, the way Obama paid Iran to sit down and negotiate.
But that’s obviously not true. There are two stages to the MOU, and Iran has conditioned its participation in the second stage — negotiating over the nuclear issues — on its satisfaction with the concessions it will win in the first stage, negotiations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
So if Vance wasn’t yet bargaining over the nuclear file or even the reopening of the strait, what could he have been negotiating the past month, except how to pay Iran up front?
It’s taken so long because the trick is making sure that whatever formula he devises for getting Iran paid won’t embarrass Trump by making him look exactly like Obama. Otherwise, the deal may be more than Trump can stomach.
Of course, the only part of the MOU that matters to the Iranians is the first phase, when they will get paid more and through multiple channels, including sanctions relief that allows them to sell their oil and petrochemicals, the release of more frozen assets, and “reparations” — i.e., more tribute from the Gulf Arabs.
Once paid, and confident that the United States won’t return to war lest it jeopardize the negotiations for which it called off military operations, the Iranians can dictate the tempo of the talks and determine how and when, if ever, to begin the second phase. Vance has already shown his willingness to help them keep stringing it out, for six or 12 months or until Trump’s term is over.
There are serious consequences to losing wars. The last time an American president lost a war, Obama was sent to the White House and struck a deal with a terror state that guaranteed it would have a nuclear weapons program roughly a decade after he left office.
If his successor hadn’t withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal in his first term and killed terror master Qassem Soleimani, and if he hadn’t in his second term joined with Israel to kill Iran’s supreme leader and the top levels of the regime and destroy most of the country’s nuclear weapons facilities and its ballistic missile program, Iran would almost surely have the bomb right now.
It’s because of Donald Trump that Iran doesn’t have the bomb. Because of the president’s historic partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Iranian regime has been battered. But that doesn’t mean Trump won the war. Not yet, anyway.
Historical trends suggest that a Democrat will succeed Trump, but losing to Iran would virtually ensure it.
Then, Obama’s party will help rebuild the Iranians’ nuclear program, and all of Trump’s efforts, and all the battles won and sacrifices made by American armed forces to stop Iran, will amount to nothing because he didn’t win. Losing wars comes with serious consequences.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth made clear at the outset of the war that the central goal of the US government was to end Iran’s ability to project power beyond its own borders. Vance said in his briefing Friday that the United States has done that by eliminating Iran’s air force and navy.
But the fact that US allies are still under fire during the war that Trump chose and the cease-fire he imposed means the administration has failed to meet the very first benchmark it set for victory.
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Perhaps, then, embarrassment was the source of the president’s anger, for when after America’s regional partners retaliated against attacks by Iran and its proxies during the cease-fire, the president chastised his friends.
Polls show that Trump voters still support his war aims. The catch is that it seems he no longer does. He says it’s always been his preference to take Kharg Island by force, but he chose against it because he didn’t think the American people had the stomach for it. But it’s the job of a wartime leader to steel the public and prepare them in the event American lives are lost.
The joint US-Israel campaign destroyed physical things that can’t be easily replaced, like nuclear facilities. Entering negotiations with Iran to secure physical things that yet remain — the remainder of the regime’s nuclear facilities and its stockpiled enriched uranium — is an acknowledgment that you are, at least at present, not capable of or willing to destroy or seize them.
Shifting from war to talks tilts the balance of power in the other direction, away from the United States, which at war made no concessions, and toward Iran, to which Trump must now make concessions to make a deal.
And the deal, as Vance laid it out in his press briefing, only means surrender. No verification regime can hold Iran to the commitments he says Iran is willing to make. What happens when the Iranians invariably fail to uphold their pledges and then turn away inspectors? They typically do. They’ve never allowed inspectors access to military sites believed to house important parts of the nuclear weapons program.
And Trump’s decision to forgo military operations to achieve his aims means there is no mechanism to enforce any of the already feeble provisions Vance is promoting.
If Trump has already put aside force because he reckoned the cost for winning his objective was too dear, what reason does Iran have to fear that he’d return to tactics he discredited by abandoning them for negotiations after he failed to secure his aims through war?
The Iranians have the upper hand, and not because of any preternatural ability to negotiate for which they’re often, wrongly, credited. The plain truth is that what won’t be won by force cannot be taken through negotiations.
If Trump doesn’t get Iran right, there will be no time left for absolution or apologies. If he loses this war, generations of Americans will pay the price for a defeat that the 47th president of the United States brought on himself.
And future historians of the period are unlikely to have any clearer understanding of why than we do now.
Excerpted with permission from Tablet magazine.
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