Vice-President JD Vance argued Thursday that Iran’s leaders would have to 'change their behaviour' to receive the material benefits of the deal.Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press
The preliminary deal signed by the United States and Iran describes a mutual commitment to ending the war and suspending hostilities. Both sides, it says, “jointly agreed, in good faith” to its terms, which include respecting ”each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Together, suggests the text signed this week by U.S. President Donald Trump in Versailles, the two countries can put behind them past grievances − banishing Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, lifting U.S. sanctions and restoring oil flows.
But few seem to believe the outcome is anything like an equal one − certainly not in Iran, which has struck an ebullient tone, nor in the U.S., where prominent conservatives have lamented a grievous loss for the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
“With this, the United States has officially acknowledged that Iran is a player, and that changes everything,” influential broadcaster Tucker Carlson said this week. He likened the agreement to the destruction of British imperial power in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis.
“With this, the United States has shown that it does not have − despite possessing the world’s best or biggest, or certainly most generously funded military − does not have the military power to impose its will on the 34th-biggest economy in the world.”
The deal is the “worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, wrote on social media. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, told Fox News on Thursday that he had “concerns that certain aspects of this deal are a step in the wrong direction.”
Read the transcript of the U.S. draft of the agreement with Iran
Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic figure on the far right who has built a large U.S. following, openly cheered what he called a loss for Israel.
“Congratulations, Iran!” he said in a video posted to social media this week. “You fought hard. You left it all on the field. And you won. God bless the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
U.S. leaders have spent days defending the deal as an economic win. ”The Markets are loving what is happening with Oil Prices way down, and Stocks way up,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “YOU’RE WELCOME,” he wrote in another post. He also jeered skeptics as ”jealous, bad people, or stupid.”
Vice-President JD Vance argued Thursday that Iran’s leaders would have to “change their behaviour” to receive the material benefits of the deal, which include ripping away sanctions and delivering hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign investment.
Mr. Vance also scolded Israeli critics in unusually direct terms, reminding them that the U.S. had supplied two-thirds of the weapons used to defend Israel. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world,” he said.
Earlier this week, David Horovitz, editor of The Times of Israel, warned that the “deal manifestly empowers and finances a mass-murdering regime,” calling it “a catastrophic capitulation.”
Israel is poised to play a spoiler for the deal, whose text demands the ”immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” On Thursday, a day before an Iranian delegation was due to land in Switzerland for the first round of talks toward a more comprehensive agreement, Israel continued shelling and drone attacks in southern Lebanon.
A raft of unresolved issues remains, too, including what will happen to Iran’s nuclear program, whether Tehran will find a way to impose fees on shippers using the Strait of Hormuz and how quickly it will be able to access the promised funds.
Opinion: Trump’s Iran deal is a national humiliation
Tehran has nonetheless struck a pose of jubilance and defiance, its leadership celebrating its own strength over purported American weakness. Mr. Trump gave in to the deal “out of desperation,” Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in a statement. (Mr. Khamenei has not been seen since his father was killed at the outset of the war.)
Mohammad Baqher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, who led the country’s negotiators, told state media that Iran had fully prevailed over the U.S.
“We did not allow the enemy to achieve any of its nine objectives in the war,” he said.
It amounts to a ”collapse of the U.S. hegemony” in the region, said Abbas Qaidari, an Iranian security analyst. The U.S. gave way “on every single Iranian demand while gaining nothing.”
That will provide Iran confidence to be more assertive in its foreign relations, using manipulation of the Strait of Hormuz to “extort the entire region,” said Mr. Qaidari, who was previously a non-resident fellow with the Centre for Strategic Studies, an Iranian think tank.
It ”will not conclude in definite resolution for international peace, but will instead open a new page for uncertainty and instability in the region.”
For Tehran, he said, the conclusion is: “We defeated the Americans. We defeated the Israelis. Who is next?”