Trump blames Vance for Iran

Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted he was being cunning when he elevated JD Vance to sell resolving war with Iran. “If this works, the credit goes to me,” Trump said of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work, I blame JD”

Trump was smiling as he said this, but it wasn’t a joke. Judging by messages from across the Republican Party, letting the president claim victory while having the vice president admit obvious defeat is the Republican Party’s strategy.

The administration’s Plan A is to pretend the war was a complete success: 10/10, without ratings, would do it again. A handful of hawks agreed to repeat this line. The main argument is that the bombing set back Iran’s conventional and nuclear military capabilities sufficiently to justify the cost to the United States. “The fact is that the missile program is in shambles, as is the nuclear weapons program,” argued conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.

This rationalization overlooks a few small points, such as the fact that Iran’s missile program is not in shambles at all. U.S. intelligence reportedly estimated last month that Iran retained 70 percent of its missiles and launchers and had restored 30 of its 33 missile sites. Trump himself now says Iran must keep its ballistic missiles out of fairness. (“They have to have them,” he said yesterday, “because others have them.”) Moreover, Trump’s deal would give Iran huge new sources of revenue by eliminating decades of economic sanctions, while providing hundreds of billions of dollars in what Iran calls reparations. This money will ultimately allow Tehran to strengthen its military capacity beyond current levels.

As for Iran’s nuclear program, if it were in ruins it would be mainly because of last year’s bombings; outside experts believe the most recent war caused less damage to the program. In any case, the ruins seem exaggerated. Iran’s nuclear materials are buried underground but can be recovered, and its ability to deter attacks by threatening the Strait of Hormuz will allow it to restore its program over time. This is precisely why Iran hawks have insisted for months — even as Vance reportedly expressed skepticism about full-scale war — on the need for continued military action.

After asserting that Iran’s missiles and nuclear efforts pose existential risks to U.S. interests, most hawks will have a hard time bringing themselves to call the deal that leaves the programs intact a big victory. Republicans who have too much self-respect to roll over so openly have a fallback plan: pretend the defeat was Vance’s doing.

“Conservatives on the Hill are stunned that Vance erased all of Trump’s military victories in such a terrible deal. Trump effectively won the war and at the 11th hour Vance is negotiating his way to a loss,” an anonymous Congressional Republican told NewsNation’s Kellie Meyer. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro complained: “The vice president of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not served the president well. » On Fox News, Brian Kilmeade tentatively suggested: “I just wonder if the vice president, who was against this, by all reports, was against the conflict to begin with, maybe he wasn’t the right person to end this conflict.” »

Graeme Wood: the humiliating American defeat

But why would Trump allow his vice president to make unnecessary concessions? Why, indeed, would a supposedly brilliant negotiator leave such an important negotiation to Vance? (Kilmeade explained that Trump “has too many plates unfinished that he can’t get into the nitty-gritty details,” as if obsessing over the color of the Reflecting Pool was a more important use of the president’s time than averting geopolitical catastrophe.)

If the logic is distorted here, it still makes political sense for the Republican hawks who want to elevate Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the rank of Trump’s successor. The war they supported ended in failure, but they do not want the anti-interventionist wing of the party to benefit from it. Their plan, therefore, is to blame Vance, who has always opposed the war in Iran, for the defeat, while insulating Rubio, who allegedly favored the conflict, from its consequences. The main opponent of the outbreak of war becomes the one responsible for promoting the conditions of capitulation to the public.

Vance is clearly betting that most Republicans will prefer his version of history, which presents the war in Iran as Trump’s latest victory in a string of unbroken victories that range from the largest landslide in American history to turning the Reflecting Pool blue again. “Have a little faith in the president of the United States,” he said at a news conference today. “The idea that he’s going to make a deal that’s bad for the American people is absurd.”

A healthy conservative movement would be able to own up to its mistakes, rather than resorting to a choose-your-own-adventure ruse that the war is Trump’s if we win and Vance’s if we lose. But the movement has decayed to the point that honest analysis is impossible, and prominent Republicans hardly bother to pretend otherwise.

When details of the memorandum of understanding were first disclosed, Senator Lindsey Graham expressed dismay. Graham has held ultra-hawkish views for decades and deferred to Trump time and time again in an apparent effort to maintain his ability to lure the president to office. When a reporter briefed Trump this week on Graham’s concerns, the president didn’t even bother to show his anger.

Daniel B. Shapiro: What did you expect?

“Lindsey is skeptical? I’m going to have to talk to Lindsey,” Trump said. “He’ll be in big trouble. Lindsey’s fine. Lindsey’s fine. He’s not skeptical. He’s fine.” Indeed, as Trump expected, Graham swallowed his objections and hailed the deal as “essential” and “valuable.”

On some level, Republican Party hawks understand that their real dispute is with the president, not Vance. A “source close to the president” told the New York Post that “JD is just a proxy to attack [Trump]because they can’t do that. If Republicans want to take a hard look at how their party got into a calamitous war, the cult of personality around the bumbling leader might be a good place to start.

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