{"id":122575,"date":"2026-06-20T19:14:27","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T19:14:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/122575\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T19:14:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T19:14:27","slug":"contributor-the-best-trump-can-do-with-his-iran-deal-is-to-blame-it-on-vance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/122575\/","title":{"rendered":"Contributor: The best Trump can do with his Iran deal is to blame it on Vance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Donald Trump has been the greatest, most clear-eyed and most transformative foreign policy president of my lifetime. But Trump is also the famed businessman who wrote \u201cThe Art of the Deal\u201d four decades ago. There has therefore always been the risk<\/a> that the president\u2019s novel and often-unorthodox approach to foreign policy could be subsumed by a greater dealmaking imperative.<\/p>\n

Prudent statesmanship on the world stage requires setting clear ends and then working backward to calibrate the appropriate means \u2014 diplomatic, economic, military or otherwise \u2014 to achieve those ends. Because of his dealmaking background, Trump \u2014 despite all his foreign policy successes \u2014 was always uniquely vulnerable to confusion of means and ends, prioritizing a deal itself above any end that a deal might be meant to secure.<\/p>\n

That is how we got to this troubling week in U.S. foreign policy \u2014 namely, the deeply flawed new \u201cmemorandum of understanding\u201d between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which represents the single greatest subsumption of noble ends into politically convenient means in at least a decade of American diplomacy.<\/p>\n

The Iran appeasement, primarily negotiated and championed by Vice President JD Vance but ultimately bearing Trump\u2019s signature<\/a>, raises at least two crucial questions. First, can Americans somehow believe that Iran will uphold its commitments, given its history of deceiving and lying at every turn? Second, what does this mean for Trump\u2019s legacy and successor plans, as it pertains to the Middle East and 2028 presidential hopefuls?<\/p>\n

We shouldn\u2019t mince words on the first issue. To place trust in Iran\u2019s fanatical Islamist leadership is not merely naive \u2014 it\u2019s delusional. For decades, Iran\u2019s apocalyptic Shiite theocracy has demonstrated a consistent pattern of deception and hostility, undermining any notion that it can be a reliable partner in Western diplomacy. The history of Iranian negotiations is littered with broken promises, yet the administration \u2014 with Vance as its most prominent salesman \u2014 somehow argues that this time will be different. There is zero reason for thinking that will be the case. The mullahs are still in charge, after all. As Roger Daltrey of the Who famously said in the hit 1971 song \u201cWon\u2019t Get Fooled Again\u201d: \u201cMeet the new boss \/ Same as the old boss.\u201d<\/p>\n

This current memorandum looks shockingly similar to President Obama\u2019s catastrophic 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action \u2014 a deal that Trump, shortly before withdrawing the United States from the pact in 2018, correctly excoriated as the \u201cworst deal ever negotiated<\/a>.\u201d Under the guise of diplomacy, the plan said nary a word about Tehran\u2019s formidable ballistic missile arsenal, allowed Iran to continue its nuclear ambitions and provided the regime with a windfall \u2014 or more accurately, literal pallets<\/a> \u2014 of cash to fund its regional terror proxies.<\/p>\n

What exactly is different with the current deal? The mind reels. The memorandum, with its quixotic presuppositions, risks repeating all those same grave mistakes. At its outset earlier this year, Operation Epic Fury had four reasonably clear<\/a> goals<\/a>: a truly free Strait of Hormuz, an end to Iran\u2019s funding of its sprawling terror proxy network, an end to Iran\u2019s ballistic missile threat and a final resolution of the nuclear issue. The current agreement fails to achieve a single one of those American goals.<\/p>\n

The Iranian regime, long guided by the sharia doctrine of taqiyya<\/a>, has always viewed negotiations with Western powers as a strategic tool to buy time while advancing its nuclear capabilities, exporting jihad and sowing discord across the region. To imagine that Iran will suddenly embrace a spirit of good-faith cooperation is simply preposterous. No one actually believes that \u2014 including Trump\u2019s own CIA director, John Ratcliffe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We should also consider how this appeasement affects Trump\u2019s Middle East legacy and, looking toward 2028, possible successor plans. Up until the April 8 ceasefire, Trump evinced a life\u2019s work of consistent toughness toward the world\u2019s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism \u2014 a regime whose revolutionaries\u2019 very first action, in 1979, was to storm the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and commence a 444-day hostage crisis. To cap off the fiery and effective Epic Fury on such a limp note, without a single American goal having been achieved, is to jeopardize that legacy.<\/p>\n

What is the point, after all, of winning the war but losing the peace? On Wednesday, Trump celebrated the signing of the agreement at a dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron at Versailles. The profound symbolism of having that particular dinner at that particular location, intimately associated as it is with tragically flawed peace accords<\/a>, cannot be ignored.<\/p>\n

It seems, then, that Trump is placing a high-stakes wager on his Middle East legacy on his credulous vice president. As Trump said at the G-7 summit earlier this week<\/a> in France: \u201cIf [the Iran deal] works out, I\u2019m going to take the credit. If it doesn\u2019t work out, I\u2019m blaming JD.\u201d Perhaps Trump meant that comment in jest \u2014 but perhaps he didn\u2019t. The buck stops with the commander-in-chief, but maybe this has also been a trial run for Vance as he gears up for a likely 2028 run. If so, it has not been a particularly impressive one. No intellectually honest person can deny that Iran comes out the big winner from yet another futile exercise in kicking the nuclear (and missile) can down the road.<\/p>\n

Throughout this ordeal, many Iran hawks have asked, \u201cWhere is Marco Rubio?\u201d Rubio, like Ratcliffe and War Secretary Pete Hegseth, allegedly lobbied Trump against the deal. Perhaps the answer, in a possibility raised by the Los Angeles Times<\/a> on Thursday, is that Rubio is deliberately missing in action: He is letting Vance \u201ctake the fall\u201d if (when) the deal inevitably implodes. If Trump cares about preserving his legacy on the world stage, then, ironically, his best remaining hope may well be for Rubio to clean up this mess.<\/p>\n

Josh Hammer\u2019s latest book is \u201cIsrael and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.\u201d This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump has been the greatest, most clear-eyed and most transformative foreign policy president of my lifetime. But…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[125],"tags":[25709,61340,34365,12,242,12841,61342,16775,186,29143,303,11659,61343,4157,4678,61341],"class_list":["post-122575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-emmanuel-macron","tag-action","tag-clear-end","tag-decade","tag-donald-trump","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-iran-deal","tag-iranian-negotiation","tag-legacy","tag-marco-rubio","tag-memorandum","tag-middle-east","tag-regime","tag-regional-terror-proxy","tag-tehran","tag-vance","tag-world-stage"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116784035609614768","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}