After the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile attack on U.S. troops in Jordan, the time has come for President Donald Trump to take a good, hard look at the advice he is getting on Iran — what has worked, what has failed and who is responsible for those successes and failures.
Here’s what has worked: His military chain of command, led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Central Command head Adm. Brad Cooper, has delivered stunning success on the battlefield — entombing Iran’s nuclear material, destroying more than 85 percent of its defense industrial base, sinking its navy, grounding its air force, decimating its ballistic missile capability, annihilating its conventional military forces and imposing a crippling blockade on its ports.
The Treasury Department, led by Secretary Scott Bessent, has turned the screws on Tehran with Operation Economic Fury — a campaign of economic warfare aimed at the regime’s financial survival. The CIA, under the leadership of Director John Ratcliffe, has provided exquisite intelligence on Iran’s military targets, nuclear program and the decision-making cycle of its leaders. The State Department under Secretary Marco Rubio has skillfully managed complicated regional diplomacy.
And, of course, there is Trump himself, who looked at a regime that has been waging war on America for 47 years and decided that he would be the first president to fight back. He has dramatically set back Iran’s nuclear program — something no other commander in chief has had the courage to do.
What has failed? The ceasefire and memorandum of understanding negotiated by Vice President JD Vance — which have driven Trump into a strategic cul-de-sac of negotiations, Iranian violations and U.S. retaliatory strikes, followed by more negotiations. Case in point: Last weekend, as Trump was on the verge of ordering a resumption of major combat, he was told that the Iranians were desperate for a deal. So he paused to give peace a chance. Result? Iran fired five ballistic missiles at a U.S. military base in Jordan. This cycle has repeated for months. Like Lucy and the football, Trump keeps getting told that this time the Iranians are finally ready to make a deal — only to be set up for failure yet again. Indeed, by elevating a deal as the definition of victory, Vance has given Iran a veto over America’s ability to declare victory. All it has to do is refuse to agree — which it is doing.
Worse, Vance continues to publicly contradict the president’s positions. In a recent interview, he suggested that Trump might simply walk away, declaring, “If [the Iranians] don’t comply with the deal, the straits are still open, we’ve still done incredible damage to their nuclear program, and we can get on with our lives as a country.” That is not Trump’s position. His position is: They’ll comply or they will get blown up. In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Vance warned that if Trump resumed major combat, there would be “94 million desperate people flooding into Europe, flooding into the United States.” Really? Large numbers of Iranians are going to get across Trump’s secure border? Ninety-four million people is the entire population of Iran.
Trump has never taken a resumption of major combat off the table. Why was Vance publicly warning of the dire consequences of the policy option (which Trump in fact nearly ordered just a few days ago)? The vice president doesn’t get his own foreign policy.
As Vance publicly undermines the president, he is trying to dissuade Trump from resuming major combat with straw man arguments. On Rogan’s podcast, he declared that those who advocate military action want to “send 150,000 ground troops in order to accomplish a change in a regime” and are being manipulated by Israel to “keep the war going on indefinitely … not toward any objective, but just indefinitely.”
No serious person is proposing to send 150,000 troops into Iran, and no one is advocating indefinite war. What many are advocating is completing the military plan that was paused in April when the ceasefire took effect — executing the final few weeks of the campaign the U.S.-Israeli combined force was carrying out. That campaign has very clear, defined objectives: eliminate remaining leadership figures; further entomb Iran’s nuclear sites; take out Iran’s remaining ballistic missile sites; destroy the economic and energy infrastructure that provides the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with a financial lifeline, as well as key highways, railroads, airports and seaports by which the regime gets financial assistance from bordering countries; and demolish Iran’s remaining defense industrial base so it cannot rebuild its destroyed capabilities.
That’s it. Once these targets have been struck, the president should announce an end to major combat, keep the blockade in place, open the Strait of Hormuz and then provide covert support to the Iranian people to help them undermine and eventually bring down the regime — just as the United States provided covert support to freedom movements across the world during the Cold War that liberated 400 million people without U.S. boots on the ground.
Vance is lashing out at those with the temerity to point out that his memorandum of understanding has failed to change Iran’s behavior or produce a deal to end the war. His failure has made a resumption of major combat inevitable. Because Trump has two clear nonnegotiable conditions for Iran: The regime must dismantle its nuclear program and open the Strait of Hormuz. And over the past several months, the regime has made clear, by its actions, that it has no intention of meeting those demands.
Perhaps it’s time for the president to take the advice of those who have delivered him success in Iran — not those like Vance who have failed him.
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