Nobody knows how U.S.-Iran negotiations will end

Whether JD Vance succeeds in getting a “peace” agreement with Iran or not, the vice president’s attempt at appeasement isn’t going to help him or President Trump. Simply put, the Iranians know that Vance’s position in the talks is weak. That’s why they are treating him with the same contempt that they once treated Obama’s envoys, as they continually take back any concessions he says he’s wrung out of them, making it clear that if he wants an agreement, then it will have to be on their terms.

We don’t know yet how the negotiations will end. Perhaps Trump’s natural aversion to bad deals and his unwillingness to be a party to a pact that will rightly be characterized as an abject surrender that will not achieve any of America’s war goals will cause him to recall Vance and return to war. He ought to know that as unpopular as the war may be, ending it in defeat will be even more unpopular. Having invested so much political capital in the conflict already, he won’t win it back by mimicking Obama’s appeasement.

Either way, he has set up Vance to fail. Trash-talking Israel may earn him cheers from the antisemitic groyper wing of the GOP, but neither they nor his fellow Israel-bashers at mainstream media outlets like The New York Times will win him the 2028 GOP presidential nomination. And if the vice president is the architect of an end to the war that will be the moral equivalent of President Joe Biden’s retreat from Afghanistan, then it may earn him a place in history, but not one that will be a stepping stone to the Oval Office.