{"id":229442,"date":"2026-07-30T16:16:25","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/229442\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T16:16:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T16:16:25","slug":"for-jd-vance-blaming-israel-is-easier-than-admitting-iran-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/229442\/","title":{"rendered":"For JD Vance, Blaming Israel Is Easier Than Admitting Iran Won"},"content":{"rendered":"

When US Vice President JD Vance sat down for a <\/a>nearly three-hour interview<\/a> with American podcaster Joe Rogan on July 15, he did not sound like a man defending a diplomatic triumph. He sounded like a man looking for someone else to blame. Citing a Time investigation<\/a> into an Israeli-government-funded influence campaign, Vance told the people behind it to \u201cgo to hell,\u201d said he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that people inside the Israeli government were trying to keep the war with Iran going indefinitely and when Rogan asked him directly whether the US would still be fighting Iran without Israeli influence, answered without hesitation: Yes.<\/p>\n

It made for dramatic podcasting. It also conveniently sidestepped an uncomfortable question: Why, after months of shuttle diplomacy, a ceasefire that <\/a>was rocked<\/a> within hours of being announced and a signed memorandum of understanding, is the United States still exchanging fire with Iran, and Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions still unresolved? Vance has an answer, and it isn\u2019t \u201cthe deal I designed didn\u2019t hold.\u201d It\u2019s \u201cIsrael wouldn\u2019t let it hold.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is a convenient story. It may also be a wildly incomplete one, built to protect a vice president\u2019s reputation rather than to explain what actually happened.<\/p>\n

The deal that wasn\u2019t<\/p>\n

Set aside the rhetoric and look at the record. Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff spent months shuttling between Oman, Pakistan and other venues trying to lock in a settlement with Tehran. On his own account to Rogan, the memorandum of understanding (MOU<\/a>) they eventually signed opened the Strait of Hormuz and paused the fighting \u2014 only for Iranian hardliners to panic at the loss of leverage, fire on shipping, draw an American response and send the whole process back to the negotiating table, where it has cycled between talks and renewed strikes ever since. A scathing piece<\/a> in The New Republic went further, arguing the deal represented American concessions dressed up as victories.<\/p>\n

This is the backdrop against which Vance chose to spend a marquee podcast appearance not explaining what went wrong with the substance of the deal, but relitigating who was to blame for its instability. And the villain he settled on was not Tehran\u2019s hardliners, whom he himself described as panicking and firing on ships mid-negotiation, and not the American hawks in his own party who never wanted a deal in the first place \u2014 it was Israel.<\/p>\n

A scapegoat with a long r\u00e9sum\u00e9<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a pattern worth naming here. Politicians who oversell a foreign policy achievement and then watch it wobble have two options: Admit the plan was flawed, or find an external saboteur. Vance chose the second path, and did it repeatedly. In the Rogan interview, he described a \u201cvery discreet, extremely well-funded campaign\u201d (his words, used once here and not reused) to derail the negotiation, attributing it to unnamed elements inside the Israeli government. Asked pointedly whether the war would have continued without Israeli influence, he said yes, immediately.<\/p>\n

Notice what this framing accomplishes. It relocates the difficulty of the negotiation from Vance\u2019s own strategy and Tehran\u2019s own hardliners onto a third party \u2014 one that happens to be a politically fraught subject inside his own coalition. It lets him tell a Make America Great Again (MAGA) base audience increasingly skeptical of open-ended commitments to Israel that he was undermined rather than outmaneuvered. And it lets him avoid a less flattering possibility: that a nation 47 years into the Islamic Republic was never going to permanently trade away its nuclear leverage and regional proxy network for the terms on offer \u2014 and that Israeli officials who said so from the start were reading the regime correctly.<\/p>\n

Republicans themselves are visibly uneasy with how Vance has handled this. Senator Tommy Tuberville offered<\/a> a notably hedged defense, saying Vance was \u201ctrying to juggle this whole thing\u201d while conceding Israel wasn\u2019t agreeing to much of what Washington wanted. That is not the language of a party rallying around a vindicated peacemaker. It\u2019s the language of Republicans watching their vice president pick a public fight with America\u2019s closest Middle East ally and wondering whether it\u2019s strategy or cover.<\/p>\n

Nor is this Vance\u2019s first outing in this genre. Weeks earlier he lashed out<\/a> at Israeli officials directly, saying the country was diplomatically isolated and had failed to appreciate American military and diplomatic support \u2014 remarks the Washington Post described as deepening a rift between the two allies. Around the same time, he chall<\/a>e<\/a>nged<\/a> Israeli critics of the deal to name an alternative, arguing the country \u201ccouldn\u2019t kill its way out\u201d of its security problems. Whatever the merits of that argument, the pattern is consistent: Every time the deal comes under strain, Vance\u2019s instinct is to point at Jerusalem, not at his own negotiating table.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t deal with the Islamic Republic\u201d<\/p>\n

Here is the part Vance doesn\u2019t say out loud, because it would mean admitting his own approach was naive: Israeli skepticism about negotiating with Tehran isn\u2019t a recent, opportunistic obstruction campaign. It\u2019s a decade-plus-old, deeply held conviction, dating back at least to the fight over the 2015 nuclea<\/a>r<\/a> deal<\/a>, that the Islamic Republic will sign whatever document is put in front of it and then quietly continue enriching uranium, arming proxies and testing the limits of any agreement. Israeli officials didn\u2019t need a funded influence campaign to reach that conclusion; they reached it by watching Iran\u2019s actual behavior for decades \u2014 an instinct even echoed<\/a> by former Vice President Mike Pence, who warned Vance against repeating what Pence called the appeasement mistakes of past American negotiations with Tehran.<\/p>\n

Vance\u2019s own account of the negotiation to Rogan is, unintentionally, the best evidence for this. He described exactly the dynamic Israeli hawks predicted: Iran signs, extracts concessions, its hardliners get spooked by the loss of leverage the moment sanctions or military pressure ease, and the country reverts to violence within days. He framed this as a manageable \u201cstops and starts\u201d process rather than proof the regime was never going to hold to the deal\u2019s terms. When Israeli officials made that same argument, he treated it not as a data point from an ally with deep intelligence penetration of Iran, but as sabotage. That\u2019s not a rebuttal of the Israeli critique \u2014 his own narrative confirms it.<\/p>\n

The countercase and where the rhetoric gets dangerous<\/p>\n

To be fair to Vance, his central factual claim is not invented from nothing. The Time investigation is real: citing Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, it reported that Brad Parscale\u2019s firm, Clock Tower X, was engaged last September through the ad agency Havas on behalf of the Israeli government to run a large-scale social media campaign. The campaign was worth roughly $1.5 million a month, targeting young American conservatives \u2014 officially to counter online antisemitism, though the campaign\u2019s output also included messaging pushing back on ceasefire critics within Trump\u2019s base.<\/p>\n

If accurate, that\u2019s a legitimate story, and Vance is entitled to be irritated at being personally targeted by people it funded. Foreign governments lobby American public opinion constantly, and Vance made that broader point himself, comparing Israel\u2019s efforts to Qatar\u2019s and Russia\u2019s and saying he doesn\u2019t mind the lobbying itself so much as American officials letting it override their own judgment.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a difference between \u201can Israeli-funded influence campaign criticized my deal, and I resent it\u201d and \u201celements of the Israeli government are the reason my Iran policy is struggling.\u201d The first is a defensible, specific complaint. The second is a sweeping alibi that conveniently absorbs every criticism of the deal \u2014 from Israeli officials, from American hawks, from Iran\u2019s own hardliners \u2014 into a single, simpler narrative about foreign manipulation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also worth noting that in the same conversation, Vance discussed unprov<\/a>e<\/a>n theories<\/a> tying prolific pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to Israeli intelligence at some length \u2014 commentary that, whatever his intent, sits uncomfortably close to territory that has circulated for years without evidence and has often shaded into classic antisemitic conspiracy thinking about hidden Israeli control. Even people sympathetic to Vance\u2019s narrow complaint about the Parscale campaign should be uneasy about that rhetorical company. Vance did, notably, also push back on the charge that he himself is anti-Israel or antisemitic, framing his position as a normal-ally relationship rather than hostility \u2014 a defense worth taking at face value even while noting the pattern above.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a version of events favorable to Vance, in which this isn\u2019t scapegoating at all but a genuine break with an unconditional pro-Israel consensus inside the Republican Party \u2014 a vice president willing, in his words, to treat Israel like any other ally with whom \u201cwe\u2019re going to have disagreements\u201d as well as agreements, pursuing American interests where they diverge from Israeli ones. Some in his party\u2019s more restraint-minded wing would call that a feature, not a deflection.<\/p>\n

Whether one finds that persuasive likely depends on whether the underlying Iran deal was ever salvageable on Vance\u2019s terms in the first place, or whether \u2014 as Israeli officials have long argued \u2014 no amount of skillful American diplomacy was going to produce a durable agreement with a regime that has spent decades treating negotiations as a tool of delay rather than resolution.<\/p>\n

Strip away the podcast theatrics and what\u2019s left is a vice president whose signature diplomatic project has repeatedly come apart in the field, and who has chosen, publicly and more than once, to explain that instability by pointing at Israel rather than at his own assumptions about Tehran. Some of his specific complaints about a funded influence campaign are well documented and fair. But documentation on that narrow point doesn\u2019t rescue the broader claim that Israel is the reason his Iran policy keeps faltering.<\/p>\n

By Vance\u2019s own account, it was Iranian hardliners, not Israeli officials, who panicked and fired on ships the moment the MOU cost them leverage. Israeli officials didn\u2019t sabotage a deal that was working. They warned, consistently, that a deal with the Islamic Republic on those terms wasn\u2019t going to hold \u2014 and Vance\u2019s own retelling of events, stripped of the blame he assigns elsewhere, largely proves them right. Blaming an ally is easier than admitting the ally\u2019s warning was correct. That\u2019s not foreign policy. That\u2019s a cover story.<\/p>\n

The views expressed in this article are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer\u2019s editorial policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When US Vice President JD Vance sat down for a nearly three-hour interview with American podcaster Joe Rogan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[65136,65137,9060,38748,53896,37,65138,65139,30517,1096,65140,38528,23580,1137,25933,1155],"class_list":["post-229442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-american-diplomacy","tag-ceasefire-failure","tag-iran-deal","tag-iran-hardliners","tag-iran-nuclear-ambitions","tag-israel","tag-israel-blame-game","tag-israel-influence","tag-israeli-government","tag-jd-vance","tag-joe-rogan-interview","tag-memorandum-of-understanding","tag-middle-east-diplomacy","tag-middle-east-tensions","tag-shuttle-diplomacy","tag-u-s-foreign-policy"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117009827928417290","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}