Trump har lige kraftigt desavouret J.D.Vance ! “But what earned him a public smackdown from Trump?” og “The Iranians learned an immediate and crucial lesson: Vance was a fool at the negotiating table”
by Seth Mandel
Taget herfra
he big Iran-related story today is Vice President JD Vance’s demotion by President Trump from “Iran guy” to “Anything but Iran guy.”
Here is the president’s TruthSocial post from this morning:
“I have asked Vice President Vance to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S. The Blue States, such as Minnesota, California, Illinois, and many more, are all poorly run, corrupt disasters. Billions of Dollars is being stolen each and every month. Our Budget could be quickly BALANCED with the correction of this large scale criminal activity. CORRUPTION is in the Democrat Leadership’s blood! We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT.”
So what did Vance do wrong, specifically? We know he failed in his mission to make Iran fall in love with the Great Satan and change its ways like a Hallmark movie. But what earned him a public smackdown from Trump?
There are a few possibilities, but surely one factor was that Vance had become a figure of ridicule to our enemies. And Trump doesn’t want America to be laughed at. After Vance released a statement on the Republicans’ historic midterm wipeout that blamed the war with Iran, the Iranians responded by trolling him on Twitter.
“Losing gambler energy, can’t walk away from the table,” wrote Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. “Boss is prepping the next war phase while America teeters on an Israel-First cliff. Skip the TED talk. Why not say this to your boss?”
“Losing gambler energy” and “skip the TED talk” are not what you want to hear publicly from your negotiating partner. Just to remind ourselves how besotted with the Iranians Vance had become, here’s how Vance described the state of play back in June:
“One of the interesting things about what’s happened just over the last few months is that our relationship with Iran has fundamentally transformed.”
Specifically, Vance said, that means “you see people, both the hard liners but also the more political people, saying our relationship with the United States over the past 47 years has been a mistake. Let’s turn over a new leaf.”
Yes, sure, the hardliners in Iran expressed great regret for their posture toward the U.S. since the Iranian Revolution. In other words, they regret the revolution and the entire raison d’etre of the people it put in power.
Come on. Would anyone believe that a few minutes alone with JD Vance made the Khomeinists see the light? Why not make a more believable boast?
The Iranians learned an immediate and crucial lesson: Vance was a fool at the negotiating table.
Doesn’t that mean they would have been more likely to get a deal they’d sign, though? In other words, why burn Vance when he was their best chance to get everything they wanted and more?
The answer is twofold. First, the Iranians had made a decision not to accept any workable deal. That meant they would not stop asserting military control over the Strait of Hormuz and they would not step off their war footing with the West.
That means Vance was never going to get a deal. The advantage for Trump was that he could show the world that the Iranians were uninterested in peace. He wasn’t choosing between war and diplomacy, he was letting the Iranians choose between war and diplomacy, and they consistently chose war.
The only way that negotiations work in this situation is through the credible threat of force. But the credible threat of force can’t work its magic if the diplomatic angle isn’t credible either. That doesn’t mean the Iranians have to believe there was a deal on the table; quite the opposite. It means the Iranians had to see the U.S. show enough toughness at the table to drag out the talks. Vance offered to give away the store immediately, leaving escalation as the only option on either side.
And leaving the Iranians laughing at the White House.
Taget herfra
Forhåbentligt vil Marco Rubio og/eller Ron deSantis stille op i 2028 som præsidentkandidater !
Når “man”= J.D.Vance er SÅ ringe til at forhandle, kan man ikke være GOP præsidentkandidat …
Leave a Reply