Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted that he was being crafty when he elevated J. D. Vance to sell the resolution of the war with Iran. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.”
Trump was smirking when he said this, but it was not a joke. Judging by the messaging emanating from across the Republican Party, letting the president claim victory while making the vice president own an obvious defeat is the GOP strategy.
The administration’s Plan A is to claim the war was a complete success—10/10, no notes, would wage it again. A handful of hawks have been willing to repeat this line. The primary argument is that the bombardment set back Iran’s conventional and nuclear military capabilities enough to justify the cost to the United States. “The fact is that the missile program is in ruins, just like the nuclear weapons program,” the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt proposed.
This rationalization overlooks a few small points, such as the fact that Iran’s missile program is not in ruins at all. American intelligence reportedly estimated last month that Iran retains 70 percent of its missiles and launchers, and has restored 30 of its 33 missile sites. Trump himself is now arguing that Iran must retain ballistic missiles as a matter of fairness. (“They have to have some,” he said yesterday, “because other people have some.”) Moreover, Trump’s deal would ultimately give Iran enormous new revenue streams by eliminating decades of economic sanctions, along with providing hundreds of billions of dollars in what Iran calls reparations. The money will eventually allow Tehran to build its military capacity beyond current levels.
As for Iran’s nuclear program, if it were in ruins, that would primarily be as a result of bombings that occurred last year; outside experts believe that the most recent war caused less damage to the program. In any case, ruins seems exaggerated. Iran’s nuclear material is buried underground but can be recovered, and its ability to deter attacks by threatening the Strait of Hormuz will permit it to restore the program over time. This is precisely why Iran hawks were insisting for months—even as Vance reportedly expressed skepticism of full-scale war—that the continued military action was necessary.
After having claimed that Iran’s missiles and nuclear efforts are existential risks to American interests, most hawks will have trouble bringing themselves to call the deal that leaves the programs intact as a great victory. Republicans who have too much self-respect to reverse themselves so nakedly have a fallback plan: pretend that the defeat was Vance’s doing.
“Conservatives on the Hill are stunned that Vance would erase 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,” one unnamed congressional Republican told NewsNation’s Kellie Meyer. The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro complained, “The vice president of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not well served the president.” 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 bring this conflict to an end.”
[Graeme Wood: America’s humiliating defeat]
But why would Trump authorize his vice president to make unnecessary concessions? Why, indeed, would a supposedly brilliant negotiator leave such an important negotiation to Vance at all? (Kilmeade explained that Trump “has too many plates in the air that he can’t be into every detail,” as if obsessing over the color of the Reflecting Pool is a more important use of the president’s time than avoiding a geopolitical catastrophe).
If the logic here is contorted, it does make political sense to Republican hawks who want to elevate Secretary of State Marco Rubio as Trump’s successor. The war they supported has ended in failure, but they don’t want the party’s anti-interventionist wing to benefit. Therefore their plan is to blame Vance, who opposed the Iran war all along, for the defeat, while insulating Rubio, who is said to have favored the conflict, from its consequences. The main opponent of starting the war becomes the sap tasked with promoting the surrender terms to the public.
Vance is clearly betting that most Republicans will prefer his version of the story, which presents the Iran war as the latest Trump win in a line of unbroken victories that runs from the greatest landslide in American history to making the Reflecting Pool blue again. “Have a little faith in the president of the United States,” he said at a press conference today, “The idea that he is gonna strike a deal that’s bad for the American people, it’s preposterous.”
A healthy conservative movement would be able to concede error, rather than resorting to a choose-your-own-adventure ruse in which the war is Trump’s if we won and Vance’s if we lost. 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 first leaked, Senator Lindsey Graham expressed dismay. Graham has espoused ultra-hawkish views for decades, and has deferred to Trump again and again in an apparent effort to maintain his ability to pull the president toward his position. When a reporter informed Trump this week of Graham’s concern, the president didn’t even bother to show anger.
[Daniel B. Shapiro: What did you expect?]
“Lindsey is skeptical? I’ll have to talk to Lindsey,” Trump said. “He’ll be in big trouble. Lindsey’s good. Lindsey’s fine. He’s not skeptical. He’s just fine.” Indeed, just as Trump expected, Graham has swallowed his objections and praised the deal as “essential” and “worthwhile.”
On some level, GOP hawks understand that their real dispute is with the president, not with Vance. A “source close to the president” told the New York Post that “JD is just a proxy for attacking [Trump], because they can’t do that.” If Republicans wish to scrutinize how their party blundered into a calamitous war, the personality cult around the blunderer-in-chief might be a good place to begin.
The post If Only Trump Knew What Vance Is Doing appeared first on The Atlantic.
