US Vice President JD Vance said that he is confident that Israel would join the agreement with Iran "further down the road," when asked about Israeli involvement in the US-Iran memorandum of understanding (MoU) during a Monday night interview with CBS News.
“What we know,” he said, “is that this agreement is going to make Israel safer, going to make the entire region safer. We feel quite confident that the Israelis are going to be brought in on this agreement once we get a little further down the road.”
He also added that he believes it's normal for close allies to have disagreements.
Uranium stockpile at center of deal
“We want them [Iran] to behave like a normal country,” Vance said, and explained that if Tehran complies with the points outlined in the MoU, including giving up its stockpile of enriched uranium, stopping funding to terrorist organizations, and making the country investible, then “benefits will float to them.”
According to Vance, the US's focus is on the enriched uranium, which, according to the MoU, would be destroyed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the US.
“We want them to have a successful country, but only if they do what's necessary to commit long-term to not building a nuclear weapon,” Vance added.
Vance rejects Obama comparison
In a video shown to Vance by the CBS interviewer, former US President Barack Obama is seen saying that any agreement that arises between the US and Iran is “not going to be significantly different, or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place and that we had worked for for a long stretch of time.”
Vance responded that Obama’s claims are “fundamentally not right.”
“If you go back to the Obama JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), what it did was it took an Iranian nuclear program that it accelerated. It basically bribed the Iranians to stop that program.
The JCPOA was an Obama-led multilateral agreement between Iran and the US, UK, France, China, Russia, and Germany to limit Iran’s nuclear development.
Vance argued that Trump’s administration is in a different position. “The Iranian nuclear program has been completely destroyed, and what we’re saying is: make the long-term commitment to not rebuild it, and you will get the benefits that come with that.”
The vice president also noted that the Gulf States, whom he claims have been threatened by the Iranian regime for 47 years, “hated the JCPOA because they felt that it empowered Iran to be a bad regional actor.”
The same countries, argued Vance, have called Trump’s plan “amazing because it transforms the Middle East in a way that makes them more peaceful and more prosperous.”