Trump ‘runs the risk of humiliating the US’ by overselling deal: State Dept veteran

President Donald Trump is taking a big risk by overselling what he describes as an agreement to end his war in Iran, according to a veteran of the State Department.

The 80-year-old president and Iran’s lead negotiator have signed an agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz, but the specific terms of the deal have not been publicized and Israel does not seems to be supportive, and former State Department official Joel Rubin told “CNN This Morning” that Trump may be setting the U.S. up for a major diplomatic failure.

“The president is still haunted by the shadow of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal,” said Rubin, who served during the Obama administration. “Clearly, he spent most of the time obsessing over how he did a better deal than Obama when we don’t even have a deal right now on the nuclear program. So with whom he’s speaking, I don’t know exactly. He says that the supreme leader and those around him are going to see the foreign minister potentially on Friday, signing the agreement with the vice president, and, of course, the IRGC, the the the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. They’re the ones really controlling Iran right now, it’s basically the same people.”

“I think that’s the key thing to understand is that where President Trump is thinking things are is not actually where they are when it comes to the Iranian leadership, and he needs to be a little more clear-eyed and a little more patient,” Rubin added.

Vice President JD Vance cautioned that the deal as it currently exists is “a very general document” that’s only a page and a half long, and Rubin said that Trump might be getting ahead of himself by hyping the agreement as something more substantial.

“His rhetoric right now is getting so far ahead of where the paper is that he runs the risk of not just humiliating the United States, but also undermining our relationships across the region,” Rubin said. “We may very well find ourselves with no new agreement. But the president saying he has an agreement, and then the region, of course, ends up in this sort of uncertainty, and that’s why you see the Israelis reacting so cautiously as they are.”