I’m going to leave the commentary on, and the analysis of, the memorandum of understanding signed this past week by the United States and Iran, to the politicians, pundits and the foreign policy poohbahs.
But here’s one thing. I watched the entire news conference where Trump laid out the details of the MOU. I watched very carefully. It went on for a long time. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was standing to Trump’s left. The grimace on his face didn’t change the entire time Trump was speaking. Not one bit. He wasn’t a happy guy. He knows the US capitulated to the terror pimps of Tehran.
And one more thing. I have learned that a person very close to President Trump, who served in his first administration, has read the MOU and says it is a bad deal. He’s not publicly criticizing it right now, hoping to talk some sense into the president during the 60 day negotiating period.
But I do want to discuss the words that were uttered about Israel by the President and by the Vice President, and I want to remind you all of what I wrote two months ago about JD Vance and his negotiations with the Iranians.
At the G7 conference in France, with the whole world watching, President Trump humiliated Israel and its armed forces, saying it was a “very small partner” in the war on Iran.
About Israel’s attacks on the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, that are constantly attacking northern Israel with missiles and drones, Trump called Israel’s response “vicious.” He said, “I’m not saying they shouldn’t protect themselves. I’m saying…they could behave better, and frankly, they could do a better job.”
He praised the ex-ISIS jihadist leader of Syria, saying he should “handle Lebanon” and that he’s been “very good for me.”
And the piece de resistance, the grand finale of Trump’s trashing of Israel, is when he declared, that “without me, there would be no Israel.”
President Trump blatantly shamed an ally that fought shoulder to shoulder with the US armed forces back when Trump was gung-ho in ridding the world of the rogue Iranian regime. He crapped on an ally that cleared the path for American warplanes to bomb Iran by taking out the Iranian air defenses. He belittled an ally that regularly shares vital, crucial, intelligence information with the United States.
He shat on a nation, whom the US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth praised, as a“true ally,” a “model ally.”
I could attribute Trump’s verbal diarrhea to exhaustion. He looked damned tired at the G7, after staying up late for that ultimate fighter exhibition at the White House last Sunday. I could make the excuse that if you take the broader view, Trump’s been the only US President who put his military where his mouth is and bombed Iran for 108 days.
I could say Trump gave Israel all the military hardware it needed to fight Iran and to defend itself from the missile attacks it withstood during the war.
I could say that. It’s all true.
But Trump’s demeaning comments about Israel and its democratically elected prime minister, also gave permission for that diplomatic neophyte JD Vance to bluntly berate Israel this past Thursday. Vance said Bibi Netanyahu has to put a lid on his cabinet ministers, who’ve been critical of the MOU; that they’d better fall in line behind Trump and shut their pie holes. Vance said Israel is a pariah state with the United States as its lone supporter.
Vance insultingly said about Israel, “you can’t just kill your way out of solving every problem”, as if Israel isn’t surrounded by pathological murderers funded by an oil-rich terrorist Islamist state.
And to appeal to the isolationists in the MAGA universe, Vance also claimed that two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected Israel “have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.”
After an incredible force-multiplying war with the US and Israel against the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, against a regime that killed tens of thousands of its own protesting citizens, Israel’s leaders are now the out of control ingrates and the Iranian leaders are the “very rational people.” Trump even said “they were nice to deal with, they were strong people, smart people…they’re not radicalized.”
So bizarre, so unreal, so Alice-in-Wonderland.
If Israel can take any small solace from the statements made by Trump and Vance, it may be found in the words of none other than Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
After the G7 meeting, Trump said she “begged me to take a picture with her…I didn’t have to do it at all, but I felt sorry for her. She’s probably happy that I even spoke with her.”
Meloni’s response was defiant and right on. She said, “I don’t know why the President of the United States behaves this way with his own allies…I can only say it’s a shame that he doesn’t show the same determination with the enemies of the West, with the enemies of the United States, with leaderships toward which he instead proves much more accommodating.”
Brava, Giorgia!
Include Israel amongst those allies of the United States and carve in stone Iran as an enemy of the West and of the US.
Now, about those Vance-led negotiations with the Iranians. I’m certainly not a prophet, and I don’t play one on TV, but back in April, I wrote a column called The Bazaar Bargainers.
https://friendwithoutbenefits.substack.com/p/the-bazaar-bargainers?r=1v83u2
Take a look at it again. I think you will find that two months later, it was rather prescient, if I do say so myself.