Vance’s Iran Trump Card

**Julia Ioffe** (0:02)
It's incredible, this is like worse, this is worse than the deal Trump could have gotten without going to war against Iran.

**Peter Hamby** (0:14)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby.
It's Tuesday, June 23rd. Today, I'm joined by Julia Ioffe, with a state of play on the framework peace deal between the United States and Iran, which seems like it's changing by the day, as Israel, Tehran and the US throw out new details by the hour and new disagreements. At the center of all of it is Vice President JD. Vance, who is owning the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, as he demonstrates his unflinching loyalty to President Trump. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of Powers That Be.

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Happy Tuesday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my colleague, Julia Ioffe, to break down the latest in the Iran-U.S.M.O.U.,
that would be the Memorandum of Understanding. They've got 60 days to come up with a, some sort of agreement to end the war, but it feels like Groundhog Day, Julia, every single day. Again. Again, every time we have you on, this goes back months now, Trump said the war's gonna be over in two weeks. Then it's not. Then an agreement gets violated. Then Bibi does something over in Lebanon. Tehran gets mad. The US says they've reached some sort of consensus agreement. Tehran disagrees. The Strait of Hormuz is open. Then it's closed. Donald Trump on Monday said that the Strait of Hormuz is fully open, that there's a gusher of oil coming through. Yes, shipping is up compared to just a few days ago on the Strait of Hormuz, but obviously well below pre-war levels. But the negotiations themselves are fascinating right now. We're going to talk a little bit more about JD. Vance's role in this, and Marco Rubio's apparent at least public lack of role in the diplomacy here in a bit. We're going to break that down. But JD. Vance went to Switzerland on Sunday, negotiated with the Iranian delegation there, and said that Iran has agreed to open the country up to inspectors, which sure sounds like the way we had it under the JCPOA, the Obama-Iran deal, but let's put that aside. JD. Vance is flying back here.
All of this comes because, again, Netanyahu made some moves in Lebanon over the weekend. That pissed off Iran. And so Vance, fresh off of a media tour last week, trying to take credit for the MOU for fixing these problems. We've got to trust Iran, trust but verify, of course. And then one thing goes haywire and he's gotta go back to Europe. So before breaking this down in a political sense, I want to hear what your diplomatic sources in Washington and around the world are saying. Just give everybody a state of play here. Did I make sense of this?

**Julia Ioffe** (4:46)
Yeah, you did.
Basically, everything we thought was gonna happen happened, which is that the two parties who were not part of the negotiations, i.e. Israel and Hezbollah, and Israel, which was thrown under the bus in these negotiations and not included in them at all. And things were decided for them without them, decided that, hey, this doesn't apply to us. And they said it straight out. These members of the Israeli government said, this does not apply to us. We are not party to this agreement. And they kept going. And Iran said, hey, this deal only works if there's a ceasefire in Lebanon. And so now we're gonna close the Strait of Hormuz, but we're not gonna close the Strait of Hormuz. So we're recording this on Monday night. And who knows what tomorrow will bring? Though I have a feeling it'll be some iteration of what yesterday and the day before brought. But as of this afternoon, Iran was allowed to start selling its oil again on the global market in US dollars for the first time in decades, not for having done anything other than to agree in principle that atomic inspectors, international atomic inspectors would be allowed back into the country to conduct inspections, which is kind of amazing in that it doesn't say like what the results is not contingent on the results of the inspection, right? Like the inspectors could go in there and say, hey, they're enriching uranium at full tilt and they're plowing ahead toward a nuclear weapon. And sure, the administration could say, well, now we're cutting that off again. But in the meantime, like Iran is selling oil in the global market in US dollars, allowing the regime that we said we wanted to get rid of to get richer and entrench itself further. So yeah.