Chilling Echoes
J.D. Vance, speaking on behalf of President Donald Trump, is beginning to sound more like Barack Obama than Barack Obama himself.
Obama wanted more daylight between the United States and Israel. Trump now wants more “space.” Obama pursued a long-term nuclear agreement with Iran, and Trump is chasing much the same objective. As Vance recently put it, “Over the last year and a half, we’ve created the space necessary where the president believes, and I think he’s right, that we can get a long-term settlement to Iran’s nuclear issue.”
A long-term settlement? Whatever happened to Trump’s unequivocal promise that Iran would never obtain a nuclear weapon?
Vance delivered the administration’s message to Israel with all the subtlety of an ultimatum: “Now, Israel may like that, they may not like that, but fundamentally, we think this is in the best interest of the United States of America.”
The fact that Vance, rather than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has emerged as the administration’s chief spokesman on Iran should concern anyone who supports Israel. Rubio has long been among Israel’s strongest advocates. His relative absence from these discussions suggests he may be less enthusiastic than the White House about pursuing a grand bargain with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. If so, that may explain why Vance has been cast in the starring role of this diplomatic farce.
Trump himself echoed the words of the prophet Balaam, who described Israel as “a people dwelling alone,” when he warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel would be “left alone” if it refused to accept Washington’s demands.
What makes this reversal so striking is that Trump built his foreign policy reputation by rejecting precisely this approach. For years, he argued that Iran’s rulers viewed negotiations as instruments of deception and that previous administrations had confused wishful thinking with strategy. He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal because he believed it enriched Tehran, legitimized its ambitions, and merely delayed rather than eliminated the nuclear threat. Trump presented himself as the anti-Obama, the leader who understood that strength, not accommodation, was the only language the regime respected.
Yet today, many of the same arguments once advanced by Obama and his supporters are being recycled by Trump’s own administration. Americans are told that diplomacy can bring lasting stability. Israel is urged to be patient. Critics are portrayed as obstacles to peace. The packaging may be different, but the premise is remarkably familiar: that the Iranian regime can be persuaded to abandon its nuclear ambitions through negotiation.
That is why this entire affair feels less like a new strategy than a sequel to the very policy Trump spent years condemning. If the Obama deal was truly “the worst deal ever negotiated,” why does his administration now sound so much like the people who negotiated it?
The answer may have less to do with Iran than with Trump himself. Few accusations irritate him more than the suggestion that he is being manipulated by others. Claims that Netanyahu is steering American policy, or that Israel is dragging the United States toward war, appear to have struck a particularly sensitive nerve.
In his determination to prove that he is not being led by Israel, Trump may be overlooking a distinct possibility: that Iran’s rulers understand his psychology well enough to exploit it. If Tehran helped promote the narrative that Israel was leading America into war, it would have done so knowing Trump would instinctively recoil from the accusation. The result is a president determined to prove that he alone calls the shots, even if doing so requires distancing himself from a longtime ally and embracing positions he once ridiculed.
That is a dangerous foundation for foreign policy.
A president’s responsibility is not to settle personal scores or demonstrate his independence. It is to distinguish between allies and adversaries and act accordingly. Iran remains the chief sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. It continues to arm, finance, and direct forces dedicated to Israel’s destruction and hostile to Western interests. Those realities do not disappear because diplomats draft a new agreement or negotiators adopt optimistic language.
In his determination to prove that he is not being led around by the nose by Netanyahu, Trump risks abandoning the very principles that brought him to power. History is filled with leaders who became so intent on proving their independence that they lost sight of the convictions that originally distinguished them from their rivals.
Trump’s greatest political strength has always been his willingness to recognize uncomfortable truths that others preferred to ignore. The question now is whether he still believes the truths he once championed about Iran’s regime and its ambitions. If not, the consequences will extend far beyond his presidency.
As journalist Nachum Kaplan succinctly observed, “There are moments when nations discover whether they are sovereign or merely tenants on someone else’s property. Israel just faced one of those moments.”
