Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appeared to lay early groundwork for shielding President Trump from any fallout over the newly announced Iran deal, conspicuously crediting Vice President JD Vance rather than the president as its “architect” while warning that Tehran and Washington seem to have very different understandings of what they signed.
In a post late Sunday tacitly welcoming the memorandum of understanding that reopens the Strait of Hormuz, Graham said he would be watching the nuclear negotiations the agreement sets in motion. “I am somewhat concerned that Iran’s view of the agreement seems different than what the American negotiating team is claiming,” he wrote.
Graham, one of the Senate’s most prominent foreign policy hawks, insisted that any agreement emerging from the subsequent nuclear talks would have to come before Congress for a vote. “I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress,” he wrote.
Graham closed his post on a wait-and-see note that left him room to maneuver in either direction: “Congratulations to all in getting us to this point. Time will tell.”
The phrasing was notable for whom it named and whom it did not. Graham singled out Vance as the deal’s “architect” while making no mention of Trump, who heads the administration and has personally claimed credit for both the war and the ceasefire that ended it. The framing places ownership of the agreement with the vice president at the precise moment the deal’s terms are drawing skepticism from Republican hawks, who fear Iran walked away with sanctions relief, hundreds of billions in reconstruction money, and an intact nuclear and missile program.
The choice of words is striking coming from Graham, who has traveled a long road with Trump. After savaging him during the 2016 presidential campaign, Graham reinvented himself as one of Trump’s most die-hard defenders, and Trump warmed to him considerably in turn. Graham has leveraged that relationship to aggressively lobby for US military action against Iran, making him among the loudest voices urging the campaign that began February 28.
Assigning the deal to Vance is a pointed move given the vice president’s own complicated history with the war. Vance, who has largely opposed US intervention abroad, made his reservations about the strikes on Iran known internally before they were launched, according to ABC News, and shifted to supporting the operation only once Trump decided to move forward. Trump himself acknowledged the gap, saying at a March 9 news conference that Vance was “philosophically a little bit different than me” and “maybe, less enthusiastic about going.”
Yet Vance has also been reported as the figure who ultimately shaped the military campaign’s scope. According to news reports, Vance overcame his longstanding objections to Middle East intervention and persuaded Trump to expand the offensive against Iran. His evolving posture has drawn accusations that he is positioning himself to escape blame if the conflict sours. One analysis described Vance as orchestrating a calculated political retreat from the Iran war, staking out ground he could later abandon, advocating overwhelming force as a backdoor way of opposing the war itself, so that if things went badly he could claim he had opposed insufficient escalation rather than the war.
Graham’s framing now folds the deal into that same dynamic, attaching Vance’s name to an agreement whose success is far from assured. Iran has publicly promoted a 14-point version of the accord that includes at least $300 billion in reconstruction aid, suspension of oil sanctions, the release of billions in frozen assets, and the exclusion of its missile program and proxy forces from negotiations, terms the White House has neither confirmed nor released in writing. The gap between the two sides’ accounts is precisely the concern Graham flagged.
The formal signing ceremony is scheduled for June 19 in Switzerland.
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One Response
At some point the agreement will be public and everyone will see what it says. No doubt in my mind that iran would not demand money. Doesn’t matter who the “architect” is, the president is the chief executive and must approve it. Ever heard of “the buck stops here”?