Donald Trump has always blown agreements in principle into a deal only for the American people to later find out that the deal doesn’t exist.
What was negotiated with the Iranians is a memorandum of understanding which sets the conditions for future negotiations.
There is no final agreement.
The Trump administration will not release the text of the memorandum of understanding because, according to initial reports, the Trump administration is giving Iran billions of dollars in exchange for the Iranians allowing Trump to go into a war he started.
Vice President JD Vance was on CNBC’s Squawk Box, where he all but admitted there was no final deal.
Vance said:
Well, I think the best outcome is a good deal for the American people, which we have. Basically, we deal with everyone in the Iranian system. You know, there’s the IRGC, the kind of hardliners of the regime, the military side, there’s the political leaders, and within the political leaders you have people who are harder and less hardline. We expect to have a broad range of representatives at Friday’s negotiations. Again, we talked to these people, sometimes indirectly, but sometimes directly, and that’s what has fundamentally changed under the president’s leadership. We are now talking directly about the Iranian system. We have good relations there. So this is going to be a successful negotiation because we are no longer sending messages through various secondary channels.
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We actually talk to them. And when you talk to them, you find out what’s real, what’s fake, why are they serious, why aren’t they. And what I would add is that we basically hold all the cards. We have nothing to give the Iranians if they don’t make the long-term commitments we want on the nuclear program, and even if we stopped there, what would be the truth? Their army is destroyed, the Strait of Hormuz is open, their nuclear program has been destroyed and we have incredible economic leverage over them that we did not have a year and a half ago. So we have a lot of leverage here, but the president also tells them: we’re reaching out to them.
If we look past Vance’s propaganda and talking points, the most important thing he said was what he didn’t say. The vice president didn’t give any details because there is no deal, but Congress wants to see what Trump agreed to.