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

[mystery-ak]

Trump Ties His Name and Credibility to Vance's Dubious Iran Diplomacy
Josh Hammer | 11:00 PM on June 18, 2026

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?

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[Timber Rattler]

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.

Well said!

[BobfromWB]

Well said!

Instead of asking wheres Rubio, ask where is 'Eisenhower' - someone who has stones and will make the unthinkably tough decisions.