The Iranians Still Aren’t Our Friends

National Review Online

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

 

In early March, the White House put out a document, posted on the websites of U.S. embassies around the world, detailing Iran’s “blood-soaked war on Americans.” It listed dozens of Iranian terrorist attacks on Americans, from taking hostages at the American embassy in 1979; to the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983; to the wave of airplane hijackings throughout the 1980s; to the relentless attacks on American troops in Iraq. This, the document said, was just a “partial list.”

 

A lot has changed in three months. Now, having signed a memorandum of understanding with the terrorist regime that the White House still refuses to make public, suddenly, the Iranians are being described as if they’re ideal interlocutors.

 

“We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people,” Trump said on Tuesday at the G7 summit. “They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people.” He added, “They’re not radicalized. They’re looking to help their country.”

 

Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, told CNBC, “This is a very interesting thing about these negotiations, is 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.”

 

This is pure fantasy.

 

By all indications, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is either heavily influential or ultimately making decisions in the currently fractured government of Iran. The IRGC was founded in 1979 with the specific mandate to exist separately from the army as a paramilitary force that would be dedicated to preserving the radical Islamic ideology of the revolution. Nothing in either Iran’s actions or public statements has justified the Pollyannaish talk of Trump and Vance.

 

Just this month, Iran launched missile and drone attacks on Kuwait’s airport, as well as on Bahrain, Jordan, and Israel. The latter strikes, Iran said, were in retaliation against Israel’s strikes on the terrorist group Hezbollah.

 

One Israeli strike, by the way, killed a Hezbollah commander who orchestrated the kidnapping and murder of five Americans. This is not an unusual event: Hezbollah, Iran’s main proxy sponsored and trained by the IRGC, was among the first jihadist militias designated under American law as a foreign terrorist organization, nearly 30 years ago, based on what was then already a sordid history of killing Americans.

 

Also this month, Iran downed a U.S. Army Apache helicopter off the coast of Oman.

 

All of this came during a supposed cease-fire.

 

U.S. administrations and the media have for decades chased after the elusive Iranian “moderates” like researchers hunting for evidence of Bigfoot. During his first inaugural address, in a line largely interpreted as being about Iran, Barack Obama said, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” In 2013, he characterized Iran’s then-President Hassan Rouhani as a moderate and then conducted a phone call with Rouhani (heralded as the first direct contact between U.S. and Iranian leaders since the 1979 revolution). Obama boasted that in the call, Rouhani committed that Iran would never develop nuclear weapons.

 

Vance is now saying, “If you go back to the Obama administration, we never had the direct line — really, over the past 47 years — we’ve never had this level of direct connection, where the people at the highest levels of the United States government are talking to the people at the highest levels of the Iranian government.”

 

Meanwhile, Trump is touting as an achievement that Iran is saying that it is not going to develop a nuclear weapon — something that it has claimed for decades while still enriching uranium well beyond any plausible civilian use and manufacturing ballistic missiles that Secretary of State Marco Rubio correctly pointed out were being used as a shield to protect the nuclear program.

 

“For almost 50 years, these wicked extremists have been attacking the United States while chanting the slogan, ‘Death to America,’ or ‘Death to Israel,’ or both,” Trump said at the start of the operation against Iran. “They are the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror.”

 

One of the worst aspects of the Obama nuclear deal wasn’t just the agreement itself, but the fact that in desperately pursuing the deal, the administration whitewashed the Iranian regime. Until very recently, Trump was clear-eyed about Iran. He shouldn’t let his desire to extract himself from the military conflict he initiated lead to delusional thinking about the nature of our longtime enemy.