By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
US Vice President JD Vance, a Roman Catholic, has launched his presidential campaign for 2028 with the sharpest attack ever made on Israel and the Jewish bloc around President Donald Trump.
He has also promised American voters their pockets are about to start filling up as their gas tank costs less at the pump. “The fact that you’ve seen gas come down about 65 cents a gallon on the national average,…I think you’re going to see a substantial reduction in gas prices…you’re going to see significant relief at the pump on top of what we’ve already seen.”
“Praise Jesus” he declared in the White House Briefing Room.
“You’re a country of nine million people,” Vance warned Israel and its supporters in an interview which followed in the New York Times. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”
In a 47-minute question-and-answer session with reporters on Thursday morning, Vance attempted to deter Israel from breaking the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Iran and the US, signed on Wednesday night (June 17).
Asked to respond to Pope Leon XIII’s endorsement of the MoU, Vance said: “Praise Jesus. I’m glad the Pope has positive things to say about our MoU. I think the Pope is fundamentally accurate and it’s going to be good for the entire world.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010968359/jd-vance-im-not-fighting-with-the-pope.html Challenged by Ross Douthat, a Roman Catholic reporter for the New York Times, for his Catholic line on the Iran war decision-making by the White House, Vance said: “I have to tell the president of the United States what I think about all matters. I have to provide him the best counsel. I have to make sure that he’s getting the best information. The president is surrounded all the time by a million different things. And part of my job is to make sure that he’s provided good counsel, both by me and others. The second part of it is to execute when the president makes a decision. And so when the president makes a decision that we are going to use this military campaign to get to a point where we can end the Iranian nuclear program, not just now, but for the long term, I believe my job is to go out there and support that and try to make that policy decision as successful as possible.”
For the full transcript of the discussion of Vance’s religious faith and his relationship with the Pope and the Church in the context of what the interviewer calls “someone contemplating a run for president", click.
In his White House briefing Vance said he doesn’t believe the MoU requires Israel to withdraw from Lebanese territory. He announced the opposite – Israel’s withdrawal will only occur after Hezbollah is removed from its political, military and local administrative positions in the country. In short, destroyed.
Vance claimed the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah means they will stop firing at each other, and expects “the Israelis will not going to be wild in Lebanon…Sometimes these ceasefires are a little messy…you’re still going to have these little flare-ups from time to time.” This means no withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon.
Instead, Vance said he favours the elimination of Hezbollah from both the Lebanese government and the country. “Eventually, what we want to see is the Lebanese government, the elected representatives [sic] of the people of Lebanon, who are able to police southern Lebanon, so that Hezbollah has not taken over the country, the Israelis are not threatened, and consequently, the Israelis are not attacking southern Lebanon or Beirut either. That’s the plan there.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/18/nx-s1-5863027/us-iran-trump-memorandum-of-understanding-full-text
Vance also rejected the objective Iranian leaders have declared that the US must withdraw from the Arab bases which have come under Iranian attack, including Iraq and Syria. “The drawdown contemplated, and again, this is the final deal. This is assuming the Iranians comply, that they give us verification…we will withdraw troops to the pre-conflict level.”
Trump refused to allow Vance to upstage him with the agreement by signing an MoU document at dinner in Versailles on Wednesday evening. Watch as Rubio is placed, not at the dinner table beside Trump but behind him as a paper carrier.
When Vance was asked to explain the discrepancies between the MoU signing plans and ceremonies, the Vice President said he had signed the document first – three days before Trump – and blamed the Iranians for the subsequent delay. “We did sign the MoU on Sunday [June 14]. That locked in the terms of the deal. What the Iranians came to us and said is we’d like not to release the text until Friday…I don’t really understand that. I wanted to get the text out immediately,. But in order to be accommodating to them, we said, ‘Sure, we’ll wait until Friday.’ And then what happened over Monday, Tuesday, the President was in G7, and maybe foreign leaders were talking to the Iranians and encouraging them to do that,…and so they came up with having their president sign it, our president sign it, and then just releasing the text as a signed document.”
Vance avoided answering the question of why his role as the US signatory at a scheduled ceremony in Geneva with Iranian Parliament Speaker, Mohammed Bakr Ghalibaf, had been cancelled. “Our plan is to go to Switzerland,” Vance added, “I don’t know when.” He said this would happen only after the “technical negotiations” commenced.
“I certainly plan to lead the negotiating team,” Vance declared.
Vance emphasized that in this process he is warning Israel and its supporters in the US not to sabotage the negotiations.
For the White House video record, click: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CUzvoCv51U For a partial transcript: https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/sitroom/date/2026-06-18/segment/03
“This does bother me is that you’ve seen people within Bibi’s [Netanyahu] cabinet who have come out and attacked the deal and in some ways very personally attacked the President of the United States. I guess my message to them would be twofold. Number One – Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time…and the second message I would give to some of those cabinet members – Bibi, to his credit, has not gone down this path — is that over the last three months two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your [Israeli] homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars….Anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the President of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.”
On this line Vance ended the White House briefing.
“You’re a country of nine million people,” Vance later told a Catholic reporter of the New York Times. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”
Vance added to the reporter: “I was going to say, you know who also had strong opinions and came from Israel? [Reporter Ross] Douthat: Who had strong views from the Middle East —— Vance: A man named Jesus Christ.”
Vance defended killing Iran’s leadership at the start of the war on February 28. “I certainly think they recognize the leverage the United States has over them…The interesting thing about their system is…that there are real divisions within their country and what we have seen…and what we’ve seen over the last couple of months is that the pragmatists within the Iranian system, the people who really do want to transform their relationship with the Middle East…and with the world, those people are winning the argument. The United States wants those people to win the argument.”
If they rule in Teheran, Vance said, they should have the right to “self-defence parity” with the other Middle Eastern states.Vance opened a significant loophole for the US to break the MoU, claiming the sanctions relief promised in Point 11 of the MoU is not immediate and remains conditional.
Correcting press reports and official leaks, Vance said, “the idea that the Iranians get all these benefits – you will hear things about $300 billion or $24 billion or this or that number of money”, he claimed: “the simple fact that the only way the Iranians get any of those resources is…if they comply fully and change their behaviour…. We have them in an economic chokehold right now.”
The loophole for the US is in the phrase “upon the implementation of this MOU” and in the future-tense deferral of payment until the two sides “will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during the negotiations”. Vance flatly denied that the US is secretly allowing a down-payment release of frozen Iranian oil revenue funds through Qatar. “That’s just not true. It would be impossible for the Qataris to do that without our buy-in and certainly without our seeing it.”
Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2026/05/31/qatar-provides-lifeline-to-irans-collapsing-economy/
“We’re not releasing a single dollar of that money until the Iranians perform…that could happen very quickly to destroy that stockpile of uranium material, then we’re going to have a conversation about it. But they have to perform….They don’t get a dollar of unfrozen assets, their money, not our money…until they actually perform under the deal.”
Iran has calculated that more than $100 billion in state reserves, trade revenues and earnings have been frozen by sanctions to date. Only about $2 billion of the total is reportedly in the US.
The release of the $6 billion in oil sale funds originally frozen in South Korea, then transferred to Qatar, will now, US officials have been telling the press, become a down payment on condition the money is spent in the US: “it’s used on American products, creating a win-win situation. Iranians get humanitarian goods for their people, and the Iranian money is used to support American farmers.” The difference between the Israeli and US press leaks reveals a contest between go-betweens and arrangers for the lucrative commissions and kickbacks.
Iranian banking officials acknowledge the loophole in Point 11 favours the US: “An agreement is a necessary condition for economic improvement, but it is not a sufficient condition. As with any international agreement, a final assessment will depend on observing implementation and conducting the necessary verification in practice.”
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