JD Vance is getting a lot of heat right now because he’s become the face of the administration in trying to deal with the Iranian mullahs, as thankless a job as one could ever imagine. The Iranian mullahs are degenerate freaks who want to annihilate every Jew, then every Christian, from the face of the Earth, so you can see the problem he faces in trying to negotiate with them and in discussing the results of those negotiations. To the extent he supports the negotiations, we’re entitled to tie him to what is a miserable deal. If I had my way, we’d be destroying these people. But I don’t get my way. I wasn’t elected to anything, and a majority of Americans appear to support resolving this situation—for the time being, because we’re not actually resolving anything—by talking instead of bombing.

I’d prefer the bombing. I want to make that clear. But the president and the vice president have chosen to go in another direction, one that the American people seem more inclined to support. They don’t want another war right now, or rather, they don’t want a kinetic war right now. They’re willing to accept a phony, temporary peace, which is pretty much what this MOU means. This war is going to go on one way or the other until either the mullahs or we are dead. That’s a consequence of dealing with apocalyptic 7th-century pagans.

What we are really negotiating for is a halftime to avoid economic collapse and a Democrat wave in the midterms. As Clausewitz pointed out, war is a subset of politics, and in this case, it’s domestic politics. You can like that or not like that, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s a fact that Donald Trump and JD Vance have to consider, even if a lot of critics have not.

I like most of these critics and agree with much of what they’re saying. Not all of them, because some of them are nuts, but like them, I’m not happy with this deal. Yet I understand why we’re making it. I also understand the problems we are having implementing it and fully expected them. I suspect JD Vance feels the same way, though he’s being painted as someone who sincerely believes this is a terrific diplomatic coup instead of the best of several bad choices.

There’s no way that JD Vance is fooled by these people any more than Donald Trump is fooled by these people—as Salena Zito famously observed, one needs to take Donald Trump’s bluster and blarney about the MOU seriously, not literally. They’re liars, degenerates, and sociopaths. Aided by the mainstream media, which credulously reports anything that anyone remotely connected with the regime—or not connected with the regime—says that contradicts what the Americans are saying, the Iranians are presenting an image of chaos. But it’s only an image. This is an information operation. They don’t have much in the way of kinetic power. They can scare ships from going through the Strait of Hormuz. They can promise to shoot missiles at the Gulf states’ installations. They can even threaten to walk out of the negotiations, although........

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