Vice President JD Vance was the point person in negotiating the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding and has since become the face of that agreement. At his press conference on June 18, Vance tried to mask the realities of the U.S.-Iran MOU in ambiguities and contradictions. The vice president repeatedly said all the benefits given to Iran would be conditioned by its “performance,” never identifying what “performance” he sought to change.
We have an abundance of examples of Iran’s misbehavior, but they are conspicuously absent in the MOU. Iran’s support for militia proxies is not mentioned, its sponsorship of hit squads of dissidents is not broached, and its storehouse of ballistic missiles is excused as a right of self-defense. Vance also boasted that “we have all the cards,” despite a guarantee that Iran would quickly reap tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets merely by signing the MOU.
Iran’s use of the Strait of Hormuz to blackmail the international community poses an even more vexing question with regard to whose political leverage carries the day. If the United States holds “all the cards,” as Vance claims, why do we jump so quickly to the negotiating table every time Iran threatens to close the strait?
Vance’s slippery language ran across the spectrum of reporters’ questions. Two of his most flagrant responses were intended as a stick in the eye of critics. Asked how the MOU compares to Former President Barack Obama’s Iran agreement, Vance claimed that, as opposed to Obama’s laxity on nuclear enrichment, the MOU bans Iran from enriching uranium. True, Section 8 of the MOU states that Iran “shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.” Then again, the immediate passage after it, Section 9, assures Iran’s right to “maintain the status quo on its nuclear program.”
There is a difference between “nuclear weapons” and “nuclear capacity,” and Iran has always claimed “no nuclear weapons” but aggressively guarded its right to “nuclear capacity.” Its semantic chicanery enables the Islamic Republic to make every advance toward a bomb short of the last screw. The MOU has changed nothing except for the additional ink required to print it.
Vance’s final, not-so-hidden swipe was against Israel. With more than a little bit of self-righteous chutzpah, Vance warned Israel to “respect” a secret agreement from which it was purposely excluded. That exclusion rendered Israel vulnerable to Iran’s forward army of Hezbollah, and Israel has rightly refused to endanger itself.
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Echoing his disapproval a year ago of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for being “ungrateful,” the vice president now turned the accusation against Israel, effectively accusing it too of exploiting American generosity. Having failed to tie Israel’s hands against Hezbollah, Vance continues to charge Israel with unappreciative recalcitrance. Better to deflect the blame on an ally than own up to a badly negotiated agreement.
Rather than successfully defending the MOU, Vance found himself having to disclose its failures. His effort to hide what some could fairly call an instrument of surrender embarrassed not just the presidency but more seriously our country on the eve of its 250th anniversary. Should the MOU be realized in its current form, it will forever stain the Trump presidency as an abject defeat, and, unfortunately, that will reflect on the rest of us.
H.V. Savitch is Emeritus Brown & Williamson Distinguished Professor, University of Louisville. He currently teaches at Florida Atlantic University and spends his time between Florida and New York.