WhatsappVice President JD Vance is leading efforts to persuade the president to appease Tehran rather than confront it. America has been down that disastrous road before.
At the moment, it’s far from clear whether the growing anti-government protests inside Iran will succeed in toppling the Islamist tyrants that have ruled since 1979. But the toll of dead protesters continues to climb, and there’s no sign of the unrest stopping. That makes it even harder for the rest of the world to continue to ignore the Iranian people’s suffering as they have done for most of the last 47 years of theocratic misrule there.
Understanding the part that the international community, in particular, the United States, has played in bolstering the Islamist regime in the past is key to understanding what is happening now. What Washington does or doesn’t do in this crisis is crucial to how this drama will end. If the government led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei survives this latest effort to effect change and goes on oppressing the Iranian people, it will be in no small measure because the West helps it. If instead, President Donald Trump pushes for change there by both military and diplomatic measures, it could make all the difference in helping ensure that the head theocrat winds up fleeing for his life to exile in Russia.
Ignoring the experts
To his credit, Trump has not reacted in the same way to this round of demonstrations as most of his predecessors did in similar situations. He has never shared the illusions of the benefits of engagement with Iran that the American foreign-policy establishment has long believed in. And in the current crisis, rather than keeping silent and staying out of it as the so-called “experts” have long advised him to do, he has spoken up. Trump has threatened the regime with military action should it continue the mass slaughter of its own people.
Rather than seeking to prop up the Tehran regime, Trump seems to be aiming to tip the balance against it. But not everyone in the administration agrees with this approach.
According to The Wall Street Journal, a faction inside the White House, reportedly led by Vice President JD Vance, is seeking to persuade Trump not only to back down on another military strike like the one he ordered last June to help Israel take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. Vance wants Trump to engage in negotiations with Tehran. Doing so wouldn’t just prop up a tottering theocracy and undermine the protesters, isolating them just at the moment when they need pressure from the outside world to help make the difference in bringing their long nightmare to an end. It would also improbably lead Trump, whose political career has been animated by a rejection of the establishment’s failed conventional wisdom on the Middle East and much else, to adopt the foreign policy of former President Barack Obama. That would be a betrayal not only of the Iranian protesters but of the people who voted him into office, confident that he would end the Washington reign of the credentialed elites who had authored disasters at home and abroad for decades.
It’s not certain whether Trump’s threats will lead to action against forces loyal to the mullahs responsible for killing its citizens. But Trump’s words weren’t merely a gesture toward support for the human rights of the Iranian people. They also represent an effort to avoid making some of the most important American foreign-policy mistakes made in the last half-century.
The disastrous Carter-Obama policies
As JNS senior contributing editor Ruthie Blum wrote in her 2012 book To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama and the “Arab Spring,” the fall of the Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and his replacement by an Islamist regime led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was helped along by the decisions made by President Jimmy Carter. His naiveté and foolish reliance on the supposed good intentions of these Shi’ite clerics led to disaster then. And it was repeated in no small measure by the Middle East blunders of Obama.
Obama not only helped topple the autocratic Egyptian government in 2011, led by longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak, the successor of slain President Anwar Sadat. The development led to a Muslim Brotherhood government taking power until it was overthrown by a popular coup led by an Egyptian military that had no intention of letting the Brotherhood—the progenitors and allies of the Hamas terrorist movement—take their country down the road of Islamist madness as had occurred in Iran.
Obama had remained mute when Iran exploded in protests in 2009. In retrospect, that made sense since he spent the next eight years in the White House working for appeasement of the regime. His vision for a U.S. Middle East policy was first articulated in his Cairo speech in 2009, when he apologized for alleged past American sins against Muslims and analogized the suffering of Palestinian Arabs to the Holocaust. He aimed at a realignment in which relations with longtime allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia would be downgraded in favor of a rapprochement with Iran, which would be given a free hand in the region.
That culminated in his disastrous 2015 Iran nuclear deal that enriched and empowered Tehran. It not only guaranteed that the ayatollahs would sooner or later get the nuclear weapon they desired but also made clear that the West would do nothing to help the Iranian people throw off the shackles imposed upon them by theocrats and their thuggish Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps henchmen. It further encouraged the government to pursue its dreams of regional hegemony, spreading war and terrorism—funded by the revenue that the pact gave them—throughout the Middle East.
Trump sought to correct that blunder in May 2018, when he pulled the United States out of the nuclear deal and then adopted a “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at forcing Iran to renegotiate the agreement. But after he was succeeded in 2020 by President Joe Biden, Washington returned to Obama-style appeasement. Iran then felt emboldened not only to redouble its efforts to build a bomb but to seek to exploit the perception in the Arab and Muslim world that it—and not the United States—was the “strong horse” in the Middle East. The result was a multifront war against Israel, growing international terror and a region in chaos.
Tehran’s reversal of fortune
In the last 16 months, however, Tehran has experienced a shocking reversal of fortune. In the fall of 2024, an Israeli offensive, including its daring pager and walkie-talkie explosions against Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, pounded the terrorist organization out of commission. That, in turn, led to the collapse of the 25-year-long Bashar Assad regime in Syria in December—a devastating blow to Iran’s “land bridge” to the Mediterranean that was key to its regional dominance.
Six months later, with the backing of a newly re-elected Trump, Israel conducted a series of devastating raids on Iran in mid-June, taking out most of its nuclear program as well as stripping it of air defenses. That culminated in U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear plants that did incalculable damage, setting the weapons program back by years, if not for the foreseeable future. The resulting perception of a defeated, weak tyrannical government, compounded by the Islamists’ failures of governance as an energy-rich nation, then found itself short of water due to drought and mismanagement, all of which has brought the oppressive regime to the brink.
At this point, there’s only one thing that might save it. That would be a belief among both a restive population and regime henchmen who may think it is time to switch sides, that outside forces are ready, as they have been in the past, to prop it up.
And that’s where the cadre of isolationists, reportedly led by Vance, who is believed to have opposed Trump’s decision to bomb Iran last summer, comes in.
Some argue, as they have for decades, that any American intervention in Iran will only strengthen the regime. While that might have seemed reasonable in the past, the events of the last 16 years make it clear that’s not true now. Throughout its history, the mullahs have always relied on their allies, both witting and unwitting, in the West, to bail them out. Though a proposed nuclear negotiation with Iran might seem like what Trump has wanted all along, to do so now after Washington has devastated Tehran’s project would likely only play into the hands of the struggling mullahs.
Iran’s new GOP appeasers
Vance’s faction appears to be largely opposed to all U.S. foreign interventions, especially in the Middle East, in principle. And given his close ties to former Fox News host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson, who has become one of the country’s more brazen Israel-bashers and platformers of antisemitism, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether the troubling hostility to the Jewish state on the far right plays a part in his approach.
The issue here isn’t just a policy that would forestall American military intervention. The problem with any new talks with Iran is that the regime has proven over and over again that it regards such negotiations as an opportunity to mislead the West and not as a chance, in Obama’s words, “to get right with the world.” Vance’s push for more talks with Tehran would either be a cynical betrayal or a foolish repeat of Obama’s tactics that would produce similar results to hurt American interests and doom the Iranian people—and Iran’s neighbors—to more suffering.
The main reason why the theocrats have held onto power for so long is that Western leaders have so often believed they could negotiate with a barbarous Islamist government that has no interest in accommodation. Tehran is, as it always has been, instead focused on undermining and defeating the West.
We know that the so-called “human rights” advocates of the left who repeat Hamas propaganda about “genocide” in Gaza are indifferent to the suffering of the Iranians under Islamist rule, just as they didn’t care about Hamas mistreating Palestinians. The mobs that turned out in their thousands to chant for “Free Palestine” and Israel’s destruction are strangely indifferent to the freedom of Iranians. But up until now, Trump has acted as if he understands what’s at stake in this struggle.
The president would understandably prefer to avoid armed conflict, even if it leads, as last June’s attacks did, to zero American casualties and big rewards for Washington. But for Trump to let Vance persuade him to repeat Obama’s blunders would be a tragedy for America, as well as the Iranian people, who would be left high and dry by that sort of betrayal. Rather than cutting a deal or staying silent, Trump should be doing everything possible to help the Iranian tyrants reach the tipping point that will end their rule. Doing so is good for the Iranian people, who have no objective reason to hate America or Israel. It’s also in America’s best interests. The president should not allow himself to be distracted from these truths by members of his administration who may be more interested in undermining Washington’s Israeli ally than in defeating its Iranian foes.
