The Trump Administration Repeats Obama’s Mistakes

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

Republicans have consigned themselves to a torturous ordeal in which they’re forced to relearn why they opposed Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal in the first place.

 

Upon the conclusion of the first round of talks with the Iranian delegation in Switzerland, America’s lead negotiator, JD Vance, said the two sides had set “a good foundation for a successful final deal.” As evidence of progress, the vice president revealed that the Iranians had agreed to let International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors back into the country.

 

Obama crowed about that one, too. But the IAEA was on the ground inside Iran both before and for some time after 2025’s Operation Midnight Hammer. Letting inspectors back in is nice, but what they are allowed to inspect, when they’re allowed to inspect it, and what safeguards are in place to prevent Iran from (proudly) misleading foreign investigators are thornier matters.

 

Likewise, Vance assured Americans that they need not worry about the funds Iran will derive from U.S. sanctions-relief initiatives. “If there is [sic] any frozen Iranian assets that are unfrozen, then we have approval over that process,” the vice president insisted, “and then the money would actually go to buy American soy, American corn, and American wheat.”

 

The thing about money is that it’s fungible. Even if the Trump administration manages to verifiably compel Iran to use its unfrozen assets to reward the White House’s preferred constituencies, reliving economic pressure on Iran gives the regime space to divert its resources away from critical civilian projects and toward its terrorist proxies.

 

Maybe the primary reason the JCPOA was destined to fail, even before Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement, was Obama’s intention to use the nuclear deal as a bank shot to address other regional issues.

 

The Iraq War and the U.S. military presence in Iraq set the backdrop against which Obama embarked on nuclear negotiations with Iran. Obama wanted out. And to get out, he needed Iran’s Shiite militias to prop up the faltering Iraqi Security Forces. The plan imploded with the rise of ISIS, but not before Obama’s deference to Iran’s terrorist proxies horrified the Sunni states. This dynamic lit a fire under nascent intelligence-sharing and coordination initiatives with Israel that later blossomed into the Abraham Accords.

 

The Vance-led delegation in Lucerne has apparently fallen into a similar trap.

 

In a joint statement on Sunday, the U.S. and Iran, as well as the talks’ mediators, Pakistan and Qatar, affirmed their intention to establish a “de-confliction cell” designed “to ensure the adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.”

 

The Iranian side of the equation was particularly enthusiastic about this provision, even beyond the sanctions relief the U.S. acknowledges and the release of “some frozen assets” that America doesn’t. Moreover, the “de-confliction cell” is already operational. “Lebanese President Joseph Aoun received a phone call from U.S. Vice President JD Vance and discussed consolidating the ceasefire in Lebanon, stopping Israeli strikes, and the possibility of forming a mechanism for this purpose,” i24’s Ariel Oseran reported. “Qatar’s PM and Jared Kushner were also on the call.”

 

Missing from this equation are the parties to the conflict that the “de-confliction” mechanism is supposed to rein in: Hezbollah and Israel. This provision, an extension of the memorandum of understanding’s article 1, is the weakest part of the deal and the component most likely to fail. Maybe that’s why both Iran and the United States have become so invested in it.

 

Indeed, to hear Vance and his political allies talk about the MOU with Iran, you could be forgiven for concluding that the U.S. just finished a shooting war with Israel.

 

The vice president has taken to selling his deal to a faction within a faction of the American right. He’s waged a merciless assault on straw men (the MOU’s critics in Israel want “to go on until every bomb has been dropped, or until every Iranian is dead,” he said recently) and invoked disturbing stereotypes (“Pro-Israel people in the United States make two critical mistakes,” Vance asserted, including “not delineating between America’s interests and Israeli interests”).

 

In a pointed message to Jerusalem, Vance warned that Trump “is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic” toward Israel. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” the vice president warned.

 

Certainly, Iran has no problem with any of this. Indeed, it was within Tehran’s strategic interests to secure an agreement that treats Israel as though it were all but indistinguishable from Hezbollah — a puppet with no agency independent of America’s and no sovereignty beyond that which America grants it. The MOU’s article 1 codifies that lie. Moreover, it allows Tehran to insist that it should not have to abide by the deal if America’s attack dog does not.

 

In Lucerne, Vance went so far as to all but dismiss Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. Sometimes, he said, those attacks are just “a junior guy who fires a drone that didn’t have approval from the high command.” Sure, “Israel has to respond to that,” Vance conceded. “But then, sometimes, that response — we could actually have a better and more peaceful situation if Israel responds in the context of the conversation that is ongoing between Hezbollah, Lebanon, Israel, and other partners in the region.”

 

That’s a long way of saying that Israel must subordinate its defense initiatives to the deal. And, really, aren’t they responding to what should be ignorable — perhaps even accidental — attacks on their soldiers, civilians, and territory?

 

The stage is now set for both America and Iran to blame Israel for the MOU’s imminently foreseeable collapse.

 

“What would America do,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked on Sunday, if a terrorist enterprise armed with thousands of rockets and drones attacked U.S. territory from the other side of its borders? “You know damn well what America would do,” he continued. “It would cross the border, create a security zone, kill the terrorists, and protect its people until the threat is removed. That’s exactly what we are doing.”

 

That is what Israel is doing in southern Lebanon. Also on Sunday, Israeli soldiers captured an underground drone “airbase” located just kilometers away from the Israeli border. The IDF even gave journalists a tour of the sophisticated facility that Israeli officials contend was constructed within the last decade “with direct Iranian assistance, including planning and funding.” In a potential intelligence coup, the seizure of this facility — one built to a “much higher standard” comparable to an Iranian missile factory in Syria that the IDF raided in the fall of 2024 — led to the capture of intact Iranian drones by Israel for the first time.

 

That Israeli operation is the sort of thing that Americans should celebrate. Instead, the logic of the MOU compels the United States to wring its hands with trepidation over Israel’s failure to defer to the peace process in Switzerland.

 

As long as the United States remains committed to the MOU, it will be compelled to at least tacitly take Hezbollah’s side in a fight it started with Israel. And all in the craven pursuit of a “peace” unworthy of the word. Of all the mistakes Obama and his acolytes made in their pursuit of the nuclear deal with Iran, this is one that Republicans have no right to repeat.