“Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.” President Trump famously declared this in 2020 after the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.

Fast forward to 2026, and the United States finds itself negotiating with precisely the state Trump once described in those terms. This is no ordinary adversary. Iran is heir to one of the world’s oldest civilizations, one that gave rise to one of the modern forms of chess, a game built around patience, deception, and strategic calculation. History, culture, and statecraft have long been intertwined in Persian political thought.

Against this backdrop, US Vice President JD Vance and senior American negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner entered negotiations with Iran through the mediation of Qatar and Pakistan, while Israel remained largely on the sidelines. For many Israelis, the entire situation feels surreal.

Many believe the tide has turned. According to a recent poll, 92 percent of Israelis surveyed believed Iran emerged as the victor of the last war.

With Israeli cities still under threat from missile attacks, President Donald J. Trump stunned observers in the early hours of June 15 when he agreed to a new “peace” arrangement with Iran.

The announcement came only hours after Trump publicly criticized Prime Minister Netanyahu for authorizing a strike against a Hezbollah target in Beirut’s Dahieh district following rocket and drone attacks on Israeli territory. It was Trump’s birthday, and he made no secret of his desire to bring the conflict to a close.

“This morning’s attack on Beirut should not have happened, particularly on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal with Iran,” Trump stated.

The result was a memorandum of understanding brokered with the assistance of Qatar and Pakistan that extended the ceasefire by 60 days and, for all practical purposes, brought the conflict to an end.

The terms of the Memorandum of Understanding can be found here.

Israel was not involved in negotiating the agreement. In fact, aside from being referenced as a regional ally of the United States, it is largely absent from the framework itself. The same pattern emerged in the Swiss negotiations that followed, where a new deconfliction mechanism was discussed without meaningful Israeli participation.

This absence is striking. The agreement directly affects Israeli security, yet Israel had no seat at the table. More troubling still, the framework appears to assume Israeli cooperation while granting Iran the ability to suspend negotiations if that cooperation is not forthcoming.

Creating a Stronger Iran

At the center of this diplomatic effort stands Vice President JD Vance, one of the leading voices of the America First movement. His approach appears rooted in the belief that a more economically integrated Iran can become a more predictable and responsible regional actor. Under the proposed framework, Iran stands to benefit from the gradual removal of sanctions, expanded access to global energy markets, and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign investment, much of it expected to originate from Gulf states rather than American taxpayers.

In exchange, Iran is expected to reaffirm that it will not pursue nuclear weapons. Yet significant questions remain unanswered. 

The deal represents a dash for a peace with a regime that recently killed 50,000 of its own people, lobbed missiles at most of the rest of the Middle East and wants the destruction of Israel. The background points to the example of false peace that humanity has seen before. Two. In the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain and other European idealists believed, as Trump purportedly believes of Iran’s leadership today, that Hitler was a rational human being. That abandoning Czechoslovakia to Nazi annexation was thought to bring “peace in our time.” It allowed Nazi Germany to consolidate its powers, only to ultimately lead to the beginning of World War Two in September 1939. Nearly a century later, the US is falling into the same trap by giving Iran’s ayatollahs and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)