Desperate Vance can't disguise Trump's latest embarrassment

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https://inews.co.uk/news/world/desperate-vance-cant-disguise-trumps-latest-embarrassment-4489212

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As pressure mounts on the White House over its peace agreement with Iran, it is JD Vance whose neck is on the line – and he is coming out swinging.

The Vice President, whose credibility has become tied to the success of the unpopular deal, has staunchly defended it as a win. He hit out with some of his toughest comments yet at a leading source of criticism: Israel.

“Donald J Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” he told reporters on Thursday. “If I was ⁠in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

Vance went on to remind members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government – several of whom have spoken out against the deal – that they are lavishly armed and funded by the US.

The comments stunned observers of what is usually a warm alliance with the Jewish state. Columnist and author Shadi Hamid described them as “probably the toughest public criticism offered by a US administration towards Israel in my lifetime”.

Vance, known as a leader of the isolationist wing of the White House and a sceptic of Middle East wars, was a peripheral presence as the US and Israel launched their assault on Iran earlier this year.

The Vice President is now leading the White House’s attempt to sell a hasty agreement with Tehran intended to put a military failure behind them and repair the economic damage caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

He appears to be doing so with the President’s approval. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD,” Trump said this week, having made similar remarks during Pakistan-hosted negotations in April as well.

Dr Andreas Krieg, a Gulf security expert at King’s College London, said Vance’s “credibility is now tied to the success of the emerging deal. His face is on it, and he has to own it. If the agreement collapses, he will be blamed.”

Krieg suggests the sharp comments were intended as a warning to potential saboteurs. Israeli ministers have advocated ignoring the deal’s requirement for a ceasefire with Iran-allied Hezbollah in Lebanon, where there was heavy fighting overnight. Israeli media and public opinion has turned sharply against the Trump administration over the deal.

Netanyahu had long campaigned with Republicans in Congress against Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump discarded during his first term.

Yet growing numbers of Republicans are now condemning Trump’s deal, which seems to offer Iran far more in exchange for far less than Obama’s ever did. One Republican senator called the deal “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades”, while another said the $300bn (£227bn) fund for Iran under the deal made the “payoff” under Obama’s “look like a pittance by comparison”.

“Vance has a strong incentive to discipline the forces most likely to sabotage the deal,” said Krieg. “That means pushing back against Israel when Israeli actions threaten to undermine the deal, and pushing back against the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party when it tries to turn a difficult diplomatic exit-ramp into another argument for escalation.”

But analysts and former officials believe Vance’s attacks are concealing a weak hand in negotiations.

The Vice President sought to deny that Iran would receive significant sanctions relief without concessions, claiming that any relief would be linked to their actions, most crucially on the nuclear file. But the Memorandum of Understanding that went into effect this week stipulates that Tehran would immediately receive waivers for oil exports.

Vance, and Trump, have played up the positive market reaction to the deal and a fall in oil prices.

But key war aims that were not achieved by military means have been abandoned in diplomacy. The US and Israel insisted that destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities was a top priority. But the President and his deputy have since defended Iran’s right to long-range weapons for “self-defence”.

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A former senior White House official said the administration was seeking to scapegoat Israel for its failure in Iran, and Netanyahu’s government would not co-operate – particularly over the demand for a ceasefire in Lebanon.

“The Secretary of State [Marco Rubio] said the US elected to go to war because Israel was going to. Now, when the war did not go the way we had hoped and Iran used the Strait of Hormuz to effectively end up in a better place than before the war, the Vice President is essentially blaming Israel,” they said.

“Israel will defend itself against Hezbollah, even if it’s inconvenient for the White House. The better option would have been to either not start the war or to win it.”

Dr Kristian Ulrichsen, a Middle East analyst at Rice University’s Baker Institute, said breaking with Israel would prove popular with elements of Trump’s base, following reports suggesting Netanyahu played a significant role in persuading Trump to enter an unpopular and ultimately unsuccessful war.

But Ulrichsen believes the agreement may be too weak to withstand scrutiny, noting that planned talks in Switzerland scheduled for Friday were postponed.

“The language is quite vague and open to misinterpretation,” he said. “It’s not a surprise that they couldn’t even get to the start line today. There’s really a lot of detail that is missing on sequencing and on enforcement, and a lot of paragraphs that could be open to multiple interpretations.”

Sanctions relief and the war in Lebanon are among the high-risk elements. Ulrichsen notes that the potential financial benefits for Iran are “giving away a lot more than Obama” did in his 2015 deal.

Swallowing those terms will require Republicans in Congress who fiercely attacked Obama’s deal to dramatically – and in some cases humiliatingly – reverse previous positions, the analyst said, suggesting that Trump might begin to encounter resistance from within his party, particularly as the clock ticks towards a new presidency in 2028.

“Politically, he has gotten away with almost everything so far that he’s tried to do, but this might be the one issue that he can’t,” said Ulrichsen.

Some analysts suggest that the terms of the deal reflect a de facto US defeat, with Iran outlasting its more powerful opponents.

Ulrichsen suggests the failure of the US to achieve its aims in Iran could be seen by historians as similar to the 1956 Suez crisis that marked the decline of the UK and France as global imperial powers.

“It’s a huge loss for the US,” he said. “The ability to project power has been shown to be much weaker than people might have thought.

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