Trump’s “credit to me, blame others for failure”: Is Vice President Vance the biggest scapegoat in the Iran negotiations?

Local time on April 1, U.S. President Trump, during his Easter lunch and his evening televised remarks, consecutively made highly controversial statements on the Iran issue: on the one hand, he pushed Vice President Vance to the front of the Iran negotiations and said bluntly, “All the credit for getting an agreement comes to me; if we can’t get one, blame Vance”; on the other hand, he issued naked military threats, claiming he would “send Iran back to the Stone Age” within two to three weeks, and even explicitly vowed to strike Iran’s energy infrastructure.

These remarks, which appear to fit Trump’s “talk big” style, were absolutely not a spontaneous outburst of emotion. Instead, they were a concentrated exposure of the core logic of his Iran strategy in his second term—completely tying U.S. foreign policy to personal political calculations, coercing national interests with extreme military adventures, treating multilateral nuclear issues with a zero-sum, transactional mindset, and ultimately dragging security in the Middle East—and even globally—into an unpredictable risk abyss.

Trump’s statements of “taking all the credit and dumping all the blame for failure” are the ultimate expression of his “art of deal-making,” consistent from his days in business to his career in politics, in the realm of diplomacy. More fundamentally, they eliminate all possible prospects for diplomacy with Iran.

Judging from the historical context, Trump’s core demands regarding Iran have never been regional peace or nuclear nonproliferation; rather, they have been to overturn the political legacy of the Obama administration and build a foreign-policy track record uniquely associated with himself. In 2018, during his first term, he unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, which had been endorsed by the UN Security Council and witnessed by multiple parties from the international community, launching a campaign of comprehensive maximum-pressure tactics against Iran. In essence, it was political theater. At the time, the United States ignored the nuclear verification conclusions of the International Atomic Energy Agency showing that Iran was strictly complying. It tore up the multilateral diplomatic consensus through unilateral sanctions. The result was not Iran’s submission, but a leap in Iran’s nuclear capabilities—uranium enrichment levels rising from the deal’s 3.67% to the 60% weapon-grade threshold, Iran’s network of regional proxies becoming even more mature, and its ability to counter U.S. military presence in the Middle East upgrading comprehensively.

Now Trump is again putting Iran negotiations at the front of the stage, but right from the start he has set “you must win and can’t lose” rules for both the negotiation team and the negotiating counterpart. For Vice President Vance, this negotiation has been a no-win bet from the beginning: if an agreement is reached, he is only serving as a tool for the president; if the agreement breaks down, he will become the sole scapegoat. Such statements directly dissolve all credibility of the U.S. negotiation representatives, making it clear to Iran that America’s negotiating team has no decision-making autonomy and no ability to back up compliance with the deal.

For Iran, negotiating with such a U.S. government is meaningless. Trump has long proven through action that even an international agreement written in black and white can be unilaterally torn up for personal political interests. Even if a new agreement is reached this time, he can just as easily flip and break it in the future for electioneering. What appears to be talks aimed at opening a path to peace has, from the outset, turned into a tool for Trump to manufacture political hype—completely blocking a feasible path to resolve the Iran nuclear issue through diplomatic means.

Trump’s extreme threats—“send Iran back to the Stone Age” in “two to three weeks,” and “strike energy infrastructure”—are not only an open disregard for international law, but also a military gamble that is entirely detached from reality. Behind it are two fatal traps that cannot be reconciled.

From the standpoint of geographic deterrence, any U.S. military adventure will inevitably trigger Iran’s full-scale counterattack, ultimately igniting wars across the entire Middle East. Iran is by no means a small or medium country that the United States can easily strike. It has substantial strategic depth, mature ballistic missile strike capabilities, and a proxy network that covers the entire Middle East. After U.S. forces assassinated a senior leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qasem Soleimani, in 2020, Iran carried out precise strikes on U.S. bases in Iraq using ballistic missiles, already proving its determination and capability to respond on its own territory. In recent years, the Houthis’ continued attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have further shown the world the enormous impact Iran’s proxy network has on global supply chains.

If the United States truly strikes Iran’s energy infrastructure—this lifeline of Iran’s national economy—it is tantamount to officially declaring war on Iran. Iran would inevitably launch comprehensive countermeasures. It would not only directly target all U.S. military bases and diplomatic facilities in the Middle East, but also the Shiite armed groups it backs would strike simultaneously in multiple directions, including the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria. If the Strait of Hormuz, which carries one-third of global seaborne oil trade, is blocked, global oil prices would surge in a steep jump, and the already fragile global economy would be pulled directly into a new round of inflation and supply-chain crisis.

From the perspective of U.S. domestic politics, this military gamble is also directly at odds with Trump’s core policy goals. Since taking office, Trump has consistently made controlling inflation and boosting the domestic economy the central campaign promises and governing program, and oil prices are a key driver of inflation in the United States. Once Iran’s energy exports are disrupted and global oil prices spike, U.S. gasoline prices would rise sharply, directly hitting everyday voters’ cost of living. For Trump and the Republican Party, who are set to face the 2026 midterm elections, it is essentially political suicide.

What’s even more laughable is that the so-called promise to “send Iran back to the Stone Age” in “two to three weeks” is completely unrealistic fantasy. The U.S. military deployments in the Middle East simply cannot, in a short period, completely destroy Iran’s military capabilities, nuclear facilities, and war potential. Iran’s mountainous terrain and decentralized military deployments mean that once this military operation is launched, it is destined to turn into a long-term war of attrition. The painful lessons the United States has already suffered in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have long proven that military occupation and extreme strikes cannot bring regional stability—they only trap the United States again in the morass of a Middle East war, with incalculable human and economic costs.

And Trump’s judgment, in which he claims “Iran is already desperate,” is also sheer self-deception completely detached from reality. After years of U.S. sanctions, Iran has already built a relatively independent economic system. Through energy cooperation and trade relationships with countries such as China and Russia, it has significantly alleviated the impact of sanctions. At the regional level, Iran has become an undeniable geopolitical force in the Middle East, with substantive influence in multiple countries. In the nuclear field, Iran’s technological reserves are already far beyond the time of the Iran nuclear deal. As for the so-called “desperation,” it is nothing more than a false premise Trump manufactures to hype up a military adventure.

Trump’s Iran policy is pushing America’s international credibility toward an irreversible state of bankruptcy, while also continuing to shake the multilateral international order established after World War II.

The Iran nuclear deal was originally a landmark achievement for global multilateral diplomacy—an example of using peaceful talks to address the issue of nuclear proliferation. Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the deal in 2018 dealt a serious blow to America’s international credibility, making allies and partners see clearly that U.S. foreign policy is not sustainable. Now Trump is again turning this major issue concerning global nuclear security into a chip in personal political games, dissolving the seriousness of negotiations with a blame-shifting logic, and using extreme rhetoric to inflame regional confrontation. He is also, to the whole world, declaring that U.S. foreign policy has no continuity or credibility whatsoever and depends entirely on the personal political interests of the incumbent president.

For European allies, Trump’s extreme policies have rendered years of their diplomatic efforts useless. European countries have consistently been committed to saving the Iran nuclear deal and preventing the Middle East situation from spiraling out of control, because wars and turmoil in the Middle East will directly bring Europe a chain reaction of energy crises and refugee crises. Trump’s unilateral adventure not only shatters the consensus within the Transatlantic Alliance, but also forces Europe to foot the bill for America’s political gamble, and the fissures in the Transatlantic Alliance will widen further.

For the world at large, what the United States is doing is steadily undermining the foundation of multilateralism’s international order. When the only superpower repeatedly replaces equal consultations and diplomatic solutions with unilateral sanctions and military threats, and puts domestic politics above international rules, geopolitical confrontations worldwide will continue to intensify, and more regions will face heightened risks of conflict and instability.

In the final analysis, Trump’s Iran bet is a personal political show with Middle East peace, global nuclear security, and U.S. national interests as the stakes. Behind his seemingly tough statements lies extreme selfishness and short-sightedness: he only cares about votes in the midterm elections, only about personal political accomplishments, yet ignores the profound suffering war would bring to the people of the Middle East, ignores systemic risks facing the global economy, and ignores the possible loss of life by U.S. soldiers.

History has repeatedly proven that maximum pressure does not produce lasting peace, that blame-shifting politics cannot resolve fundamental contradictions, and that military adventures only bring endless disasters. Trump’s Iran policy will not only fail to achieve the “agreement” and “victory” he talks about; it will instead push the Middle East into the abyss of full-scale war, and ultimately force the United States—and the whole world—to pay an unbearable price for this selfish political gamble.

Author’s note: Source of materials—official media / online news

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