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JD VANCE: The opening of the Strait of Hormuz, the ending of the Iranian nuclear program – all of these things have already been accomplished. The question for us now is how much more can we accomplish together.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

That’s Vice President JD Vance speaking in Switzerland today. He’s there for talks with Iranian negotiators. NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins us now. Hi, Mara.

MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Ayesha.

RASCOE: So Vance said all these things, but listed two, and neither of them are quite settled. What do we know at the moment?

LIASSON: Well, so far, the parties have signed a memorandum of understanding that was supposed to start a 60-day negotiation period for all of the tough issues. As soon as it was signed, though, the Strait of Hormuz was supposed to be opened. But not only did Iran briefly postpone the talks. They also said they closed the strait again because Israel was still bombing Lebanon. So this is not just a negotiation between the U.S. and Iran. It has to do with Israel too, who has not stopped the other front of this war – if we want to call it that – in Lebanon, where Israel is trying to destroy Hezbollah, which is an Iranian proxy. And on that front, there have been many ceasefires, many failed ceasefires between Israel and Hezbollah in a matter of weeks.

RASCOE: OK. So we’ll have to wait to see what comes out of today’s talks. But what’s the read on the memorandum already signed and, as we’ve seen, not always enforced so far?

LIASSON: Well, it’s being criticized not just by foreign policy experts but also across the board from Trump’s own coalition. There are parts of Donald Trump’s coalition – the Make America Great Again movement – who voted for him because he had promised no more foreign wars. So they’re angry that the war started in the first place. They don’t feel America got much out of it anyway. They say the memorandum of understanding is basically a return to the status quo ante, where Iran can still close the strait if it wants to. And we saw Iran say they did that yesterday, even though the U.S. says the strait is open.

Then there are Iran hawks in the Republican Party who feel the deal is no better than the one President Obama got 10 years ago – a deal that Trump has been attacking for years. Iran gets to keep its ballistic missile program. It gets to unfreeze some of its frozen assets. It gets a $300 billion reconstruction plan, which Trump says the U.S. will not be investing in, but U.S. allies in the Gulf will be. And it kicks the can down the road on uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons. It doesn’t meet any of Donald Trump’s other original goals for the war, like unconditional surrender and regime change.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page said, quote, “this is a recipe for the surrender of the strait to the dictates of Iranian foreign policy.” And not surprisingly, Trump has attacked his critics, calling them stupid and bad people.

RASCOE: Well, so bottom line, is getting the memorandum to stick, at a bare minimum, better than continuing military pressure on Iran?

LIASSON: Well, politically, absolutely. I think Donald Trump made a rational political decision. He needed oil prices to come down. The price of gas, the price of fertilizer, which causes the price of food to go up, were really hurting his party in the midterms as long as the Strait of Hormuz was closed. So if the price of gas goes down to $3 a gallon, it’s possible voters will be thankful and not so angry about the party in power. So if the Strait of Hormuz opens, gas prices go down, it would be a domestic political success even if geopolitically it does nothing to remove Iran as a threat.

RASCOE: Well, speaking of geopolitics, Trump just returned from the G7 forum in France. What stood out to you from that meeting?

LIASSON: Well, what stood out to me is that he signed the memorandum of understanding in Versailles, which is exactly the same place where the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 was signed, which officially ended World War I, but also was widely considered to be such a bad treaty, it set the stage for World War II.

RASCOE: And what did Trump find back in D.C. when he returned?

LIASSON: One thing he found was the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool full of algae and peeling blue paint. There’s a ton of green, slimy algae in the pool, which could be caused by the fact that the pool is now absorbing more sunlight and heat because Trump painted the bottom of the pool dark blue, which he calls American flag blue. And that paint itself is also peeling off, so you can see the peeling paint and the algae as a metaphor for Trump’s troubles getting the world to obey him or just a temporary blip in Trump’s beautification of Washington, D.C.

RASCOE: That’s NPR’s Mara Liasson. Mara, thank you so much.

LIASSON: You’re welcome.

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