Well anytime you put Vance in charge you have to assume the mission is going to fail. This entire thing is a very sad episode in American history, Trump has failed miserably, and has set the US back decades, and has advanced Iran's causes. Mr. Vance claimed that one immediate concession in the memorandum of understanding — lifting oil sanctions on Iran — was “not a new benefit” for the country. The claim ignores how the economic penalties in place before the war forced Iran to resort to desperate methods to sell oil. The sanctions forced Iran to sell its oil at a steep discount from market prices, mostly to refineries in China that were willing to risk running afoul of U.S. sanctions. Now, under its preliminary deal with the United States, Iran will be able to sell its oil for more, and to a wider array of buyers. The country will also receive payment in more attractive currencies. The memorandum commits the United States to supporting the establishment of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran, and it opens the door to the unfreezing of billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets held around the world. The memorandum also calls for the lifting of an array of international sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy for years, subject to agreement on the final deal. Critics have said the memorandum amounts to a giveaway, with no assurance of the United States getting anything in return. Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran. It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them. Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. The deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days means that Iran can boast that it has chased the U.S. military out of the region. Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Worse still for Israel, by constraining its military in Lebanon — indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country — the agreement seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war. The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East. And Iran’s nuclear program? The existential threat to Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has tried to eliminate throughout his career, and which was Mr. Trump’s primary reason for joining the wars on Iran, was left for a later stage of U.S.-Iran negotiations. “It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, a hawkish former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview. David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation,” in the headline of a fiery opinion column. And Nir Dvori, an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12 News, likened the deal to a “diplomatic Oct. 7” — a cataclysmic disaster for which Israel was wholly unprepared. “We are remaking the region,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, said on Thursday. “Iran came out stronger, and I believe is now the regional hegemon,” he added. “They stood up to the U.S., the global superpower. They can have missiles, and there’s nothing in the agreement about the nuclear issue except we’ll talk about it. This is an Iranian victory over the U.S. and Israel.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/world/middleeast/israel-iran-deal-reaction-netanyahu.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
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