Vice President JD Vance’s sales pitch for the Iran deal is simply terrible — but President Donald Trump’s may be worse.
Maybe the reporting on what’s in the Memorandum of Understanding is wrong, but Team Trump keeps confirming some of the worst news.
As best we can tell, the deal does nothing to achieve the aims America started the war with — but does hand Tehran a whole series of gains.
Iran gets at least a few billion in immediate funds and can start selling oil right away, with at least some other sanctions dropped as well.
More, Tehran wins unprecedented authority over the Strait of Hormuz and likely locks in Hezbollah’s dominance of Lebanon.
Recall our goals: The prez opened combat seeking to permanently end Iran’s nuclear threat, and also eliminate its missiles and other offensive capabilities, and we also hoped for regime change.
The bombing set back its nuke programs, took out a lot of missiles and missile factories and decapitated most of the regime’s top leadership.
All the talks since the start of April have done nothing more — indeed, have only let new Iranian leaders rebuild and regroup, even as the populace suffers.
Why think they’ll change in another 60 days of talking?
Vance’s happy case is that the big prizes for Iran are contingent on its behavior; as he said on “Hannity”: “If they’re willing to behave like a normal country,” quit chasing nukes and funding terror, “then we are willing to actually fundamentally transform our relationship with them.”
But that’s been true ever since the 1979 revolution, and the regime has never gone for it.
Trump, talking with Qatar’s ruler (!), actually claimed the regime has changed, since we killed off so many leaders and those who wound up in charge “are very rational people,” “nice to deal with,” “not radicalized.”
Huh? It’s the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps calling the shots over there now — the goons most committed to the radical agenda.
Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner never talked to them, only to political fronts for the real powers.
And it’s easy to be “nice” when the negotiations are handing you win after win.
Trump’s proud that Tehran promises to stick to only peaceful nuclear programs, but it’s never stopped making that promise even as it’s never ceased doing the opposite.
“We’ve never had this level of direct communication with the Iranian leadership,” Vance bragged on “Hannity.”
Again: They weren’t talking to the real leaders, just front men.
Sadder still, he claimed: “We’re seeing even people that I would have assumed are hardliners who are kind of saying, ‘Maybe it was a mistake for us to do the things that we’ve done over the last 40 years. Maybe we should turn over a new leaf in the relationship with the United States of America.’”
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They were slaughtering 40,000 of their own civilians just months ago; suddenly they’re going to get “normal”?
No: “Hardliner vs. moderate” is just a good cop-bad cop schtick the Iranians have pulled on Westerners for decades — right along with pretending regret over the past.
It’s beyond foolish to think the Iranians have changed just because they say so.
It seems to us that Team Trump doesn’t want to use force to open the Strait, it’s panicking over oil prices and the midterms and just wants to forget its promises to help the Iranian people.
We’d love to be proven wrong, and they haven’t given away the whole store yet.
Other than the cash Tehran takes in at the start, Washington can withdraw its promises as readily as the Iranians always do theirs.
Cross your fingers that the next 60 days show that Iran really has changed — or that the prez and his braintrust have come to their senses.
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