A Peace Worse Than War

The Vance Plan fails to understand the regime

Donald Trump started a war with Iran, and now he is ending it on terms worse than the status quo he inherited. That is the plain shape of what happened, however the White House and its surrogates dress it up.

The war came at a price—lost lives, oil markets convulsing, allies rattled, and an economic shock that rippled from Tehran to global commodity prices. What started as a strong campaign to end a regime is ending with subsidy and surrender by the Americans. We are choosing to give up.

The ending arrives as a memorandum of understanding, signed on Sunday, whose full text the administration has been conspicuously slow to publish. When a deal is good, you release the text. When you guard it, you are managing a story rather than reporting a victory. Senator Lindsey Graham, no dove, has asked for the document and admitted he is concerned Iran reads the agreement differently than our own negotiators claim.

He is not alone. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth both raised concerns about the deal in internal discussions, while Vice President Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner pushed it through. Most damning, CIA Director John Ratcliffe reportedly told the President that the intelligence raises serious doubts Iran will ever take the nuclear steps we are demanding—because the way Iranian officials discuss the deal privately is inconsistent with what they tell the mediators. The President’s own intelligence chief is warning him that the other side is lying. The deal proceeds anyway.

Look at what we are trading for. The framework reopens the Strait of Hormuz, but it hands Tehran a seat—alongside Oman—to define the strait’s “future administration and maritime services,” and Iranian state media is already floating transit fees for ships, something that did not exist before the war. We fought a war partly over Iran’s chokehold on the world’s energy artery, and the settlement positions Iran to collect tolls on it, but called fees because President Trump insisted they would not collect tolls. That is not deterrence. That is a protection racket.

Then there is the money. Any final deal contemplates a $300 billion fund for Iran’s reconstruction, and in the meantime, the United States may release frozen Iranian assets as gestures of good faith under a pay-for-performance model. Set aside whether that performance ever materializes. Money is fungible. Every dollar that underwrites Iranian reconstruction frees a dollar the regime can funnel to the IRGC, the Quds Force, and the proxy archipelago—Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the militias of Iraq and Syria. You cannot earmark your way out of arithmetic when one regime controls the entire ledger.

We have run this experiment before. Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970 and signed Barack Obama’s JCPOA in 2015. Across both, it built secret enrichment plants exposed by outsiders rather than declared, i.e., Natanz in 2002 and Fordow in 2009, preserved a hidden archive of its weapons program, stonewalled inspectors, sanitized sites, and was found by the IAEA last year to be in non-compliance with its safeguards, enriching uranium to near-weapons grade. Iranian signatures have never once constrained Iranian concealment. Ratcliffe is simply describing, in 2026, the same pattern we should have learned to expect.

And here is the failure that unites Obama and Trump, the blind spot neither administration will name: Mahdism, a religious belief that Iran must set the stage for the return of the Twelfth Imam, who disappeared from the planet as a child, but will return. The Revolutionary Guard promotes ideological zeal over competence. Devout believers in a militaristic Mahdism control Iran’s three pillars of power—its militias, its missiles, and its nuclear program. These are men for whom the destruction of Israel is not policy but prerequisite, a barrier to be removed so the Twelfth Imam may return. This is not opinion. It is the presuppositional foundation on which the regime operates.

You cannot deter an actor who may welcome the fire he is supposed to fear. Restraint-for-incentives assumes a rational regime weighing costs and benefits like the rest of us. The men running Iran believe their task is to hasten the apocalypse. “The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you’re seeing people within the Iranian system—senior leadership, even IRGC officials—say, ‘You know what? We recognize the way that we’ve done business with the US for 47 years is a mistake. Let’s try something else,’” Vice President Vance told Jake Tapper on CNN. No one, except the Vice President, believes this, and the fundamental structure of Iran’s governance and military is built on the United States as the Great Satan. Like the existence of Israel, our presence in the Middle East impedes the return of the Mahdi, and Iran fundamentally believes, by faith, we too must be destroyed.

Iran even has a doctrine of lying, called taqiyya, to tell the infidel what they want to hear to lull them into complacency. The CIA Director warned the President that our intelligence shows the internal discussions within Iran differ from what they have told the Vice President, but the Vice President seems to really believe what the Iranians are telling him, not what they are telling each other privately in Tehran.

So we began a war we did not have to begin, and we are ending it by funding and legitimizing the one regime whose theology makes deterrence a fantasy. We are now worse than where we started—and still blind to why.