Trump Ties His Name and Credibility to Vance's Dubious Iran Diplomacy

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 "The Art of the Deal" four decades ago. There has therefore always been the risk that the president's novel and often unorthodox approach to foreign policy could be subsumed by a greater dealmaking imperative.

Prudent statesmanship on the world stage requires setting clear ends and then working backward to calibrate the appropriate means -- diplomatic, economic, military or otherwise -- to achieve those ends. Because of his dealmaking background, Trump -- despite all his foreign policy successes -- 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.

That is how we got to this troubling week in U.S. foreign policy -- namely, the deeply flawed new "memorandum of understanding" 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.

The Iran appeasement, primarily negotiated and championed by Vice President JD Vance but ultimately bearing Trump's signature, 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's legacy and successor plans, as it pertains to the Middle East and 2028 presidential hopefuls?

We shouldn't mince words on the first issue. To place trust in Iran's fanatical Islamist leadership is not merely naive -- it's delusional. For decades, Iran's 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 -- with Vance as its most prominent salesman -- somehow argues 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 "Won't Get Fooled Again": "Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss."

This current MOU looks shockingly similar to former President Barack Obama's catastrophic 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action -- a deal that Trump, shortly before withdrawing the United States from the pact in 2018, correctly excoriated as the "worst deal ever negotiated." Under the guise of diplomacy, the plan said nary a word about Tehran's formidable ballistic missile arsenal, allowed Iran to continue its nuclear ambitions, and provided the regime with a windfall -- or, more accurately, literal pallets -- of cash to fund its regional terror proxies.

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

The Iranian regime, long guided by the sharia doctrine of taqiyya, 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 -- including Trump's own CIA director, John Ratcliffe.

We should also consider how this appeasement affects Trump's Middle East legacy and, looking toward 2028, possible successor plans. Up until the April 8 ceasefire, Trump evinced a life's work of consistent toughness toward the world's No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism -- a regime whose revolutionaries' 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.

What is the point, after all, of winning the war but losing the peace? On Wednesday, Trump celebrated the signing of the MOU 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, cannot be ignored.

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 G7 summit earlier this week in France: "If (the Iran deal) works out, I'm going to take the credit. If it doesn't work out, I'm blaming JD." Perhaps Trump meant that comment in jest -- but perhaps he didn't. 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.

Throughout this ordeal, many Iran hawks have asked, "Where is Marco Rubio?" 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 on Thursday, is that Rubio is deliberately missing in action: He is letting Vance "take the fall" 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.

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To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.