As the United States and Iran prepare to formally sign a settlement in Switzerland on Friday, with Vice President Vance leading the American delegation and President Trump attending the G7 in France, investigative journalist Lee Smith published a piece in Tablet Magazine titled Donald Trump’s Pallets of Cash arguing that what is being sold as a historic win is structurally indistinguishable from the Obama JCPOA that Trump spent a decade mocking.
Liel Leibovitz, editor at large for Tablet and host of the Rootless podcast, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer and said he finds it hard to disagree with Smith’s characterization.
The central claim in Smith’s reporting is that the United Arab Emirates is making twenty billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets available, with three billion already delivered to Tehran, and that the extended negotiations over reopening the strait were not actually about the strait at all. What Vance has been negotiating for the past month, Smith argues, is how to structure Iran’s upfront payment in a way that does not embarrass Trump by making him look identical to Obama. The nuclear file was not on the table during those negotiations. The memorandum of understanding has two stages and Iran has conditioned its participation in the second stage, which covers nuclear issues, on satisfaction with what it wins in the first stage covering the strait. That means Iran gets paid before it performs on the things that actually matter.
Leibovitz said the president’s instinct at the outset was correct. He understood the scope of the Iranian threat and acted on it. Operation Epic Fury achieved real things. But somewhere in the middle, the president lost his nerve and listened to people in his orbit who had different intentions, and the result is what Leibovitz described as rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory. He said bombing Kharg Island, which produces roughly thirty million barrels of oil, would have made clear to Tehran that this was not a game of tic-tac-toe. Instead, the administration returned all the cards to Iran. Iran now has money coming. Regional actors who understood Iran had lost militarily are now making their visits to Tehran because they can read the outcome. Iran will rebuild. Iran will reconstitute. And Iran will wait patiently for what Leibovitz called the return of Barack Obama in the 2028 election, by which he means whatever Democrat the Obama apparatus backs to continue the same approach to Iran under a different name.
He said the most damaging aspect is the signal sent to American allies globally. Israel fought alongside the United States for American national security interests that happened to align with Israeli ones, and is now being told to refrain from responding to Hezbollah missile attacks so as not to jeopardize the deal. He said if you are Ukraine, Taiwan, or any other American ally watching that dynamic, you now have an answer to the question of whether the United States will stand by you if you fight China or Russia. He called it absolutely the wrong answer.
On the French attempt at the G7 to distinguish between Hezbollah’s political arm and its military wing, which the Lebanese foreign minister himself called nonsense, Leibovitz said the language of deescalation, differentiation between moderates and radicals, and deal-making that Western Europe speaks is the same language the Trump administration is now deploying. He said the same language the Republican Party mocked the Obama administration for using for eight years is now being spoken by the senior White House official widely understood to be Vance, who is promising that the moderates within the IRGC will now take the reins and transform Iran. He called it bad faith nonsense and suggested Vance has distinguished himself as a remarkably effective Obamaite.
On the longer-term political implications for 2028, Leibovitz said his concern is less about America’s relationship with Israel, which is a sovereign country capable of acting in its own interest, and more about American national security broadly. He said if historical patterns hold, a Republican administration of several years produces a Democratic resurgence, and the foreseeable alternative if it is not a Democrat is Vance, who appears to genuinely believe in a restrainer foreign policy that Leibovitz said is being sold under a completely idiotic framing. Nobody was proposing Vietnam-scale entanglement or an Iraq-style democracy project. The goals of the Iran campaign were clear and achievable. They required resolution and sacrifice and a wartime president willing to stand before the American people and explain why America was fighting. Instead, the Republican Party appears to be in the grip of what he called the Tucker Carlson anti-America wing, which he described as deeply distressing for the long term. His hope rests on Marco Rubio having a different vision and on Trump’s gut instincts eventually reasserting themselves over what he has absorbed from the restrainer faction around him.