Vice President Vance made the rounds on television Monday to sell the Iran settlement announced Sunday, describing a two-step verification process in which Iran gets access to the global economy and sanctions relief only if it honors its commitments, and claiming that the negotiations have produced a fundamentally transformed relationship with Iran and that hardliners within the regime are acknowledging that forty-seven years of hostility toward the United States was a mistake and that they want to turn over a new leaf. Maritime traffic has begun moving through the strait. Trump is in France for the G7.
Michael Rubin, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to offer an assessment that was considerably less optimistic than the vice president’s.
Rubin said the fundamental problem is that every American president who believes the trouble with Iran stems from his predecessors’ failures rather than from Iranian ideology and Iranian agency is setting himself up to make the same mistake again. He said Vance’s statement about hardliners concluding that hostility toward America was a mistake and wanting to turn over a new leaf reflects calibrating American strategy to wishful thinking rather than reality. He said the Iranians have agency, a distinct ideology rooted in the return of the hidden imam and the expansion of the Islamic revolution, and that Trump is projecting his own dealmaker pragmatism onto adversaries who do not share it.
On the question of whether the deal represents something worse than, comparable to, or better than the Obama JCPOA, Rubin said it is a catastrophe. He said Trump himself tweeted after the elimination of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 that Iran has never won a war and never lost a negotiation, and said that maxim now appears to be precisely accurate. He said the structural problem with the 2015 nuclear deal was that it left Iran with an industrial-scale nuclear program and included sunset clauses that would allow controls to expire over time. The current deal, he said, does the same thing. He added a second fundamental problem: nobody actually knows who they are negotiating with. The Iranian government’s internal power structure is sufficiently opaque that it is unclear whether Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf, who is a former IRGC commander and who is expected to be part of the negotiating team, actually controls the relevant levers. If money flows to Iran, who receives it is an open question, and both Hezbollah and Hamas have already signaled they expect a share.
On the $300 billion reconstruction fund that has been discussed as part of the broader framework, Rubin noted that this was not Iranian propaganda or misreporting by hostile journalists but was being briefed by the Trump administration’s own people on background calls. Vance’s claim that mischaracterizations of the financial arrangements come from Iranian hardliners trying to oversell the deal to domestic audiences does not hold up when the Trump administration was itself describing those arrangements. He cited Washington Post reporter Mark Thompson’s characterization that providing this kind of money to Iran while the IRGC remains in power is equivalent to providing the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany while the Nazis were still in power and said he thinks that comparison is accurate.
His preferred alternative use of the frozen Iranian assets would be to distribute them to the Gulf States, Lebanon, Kuwait, Bahrain, and others that were struck by Iran during the conflict, framing it as reparations. He said that approach would accomplish three things simultaneously: teach Iran a lesson about the cost of aggression, show American allies in the region that the United States has their back, and in the Lebanese case specifically, demonstrate to Shia communities in southern Lebanon that the Lebanese government rather than Hezbollah is the entity capable of delivering reconstruction and economic benefit. He said the United States is instead snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
On the internal factional conflict within the Trump administration between what he characterized as the Vance-Witkoff-Kushner camp and the Rubio-Hegseth-Ratcliffe camp, with the latter having reportedly expressed to Trump that their intelligence assessments give serious reason to doubt Iran will comply with any nuclear restrictions, Rubin said the broader pattern of American administrations kneecapping themselves through internal political battles is something every adversary now understands and factors into their negotiating strategy. He said the United States cannot win wars or negotiations if Congress is not on board and if internal administration politics take priority over strategic coherence.
He said the inclusion of a mandatory ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah as part of the settlement framework is a poison pill. Iran will arm Hezbollah, provoke Hezbollah to attack Israel, and when Israel responds in self-defense, Iran will use that Israeli response as a pretext to walk away from the deal while keeping whatever financial benefits have already been transferred. He expressed particular concern about State Department comments suggesting that Syria, now governed by a former al-Qaeda leader, could serve as a guarantor of Israeli security from Hezbollah. He called that suggestion absolutely bonkers.