@Farbod Babaeipirouz Yes, I think this is a possibility. I'm not a 5D-chess guy. I think Trump is more instinct and improve, sometimes to his own detriment but often not. He may have been frustrated by the Iran situation and thought, "let's throw Vance at this since he's so adamant that we should try being nice." And, if it goes south, which it predictably already is, hey, Vance is the scapegoat, and his influence is curtailed, and possibly his prospects for political leadership are permanently damaged. What Vance said about durable peace and changing the relationship with Iran are indeed rookie mistakes. He's going into the world's biggest diplomatic hornet's nest, a place (the Middle East) that has confounded and exasperated statesmen for millennia, thinking he can get talk jihadis out of jihad...it's clown world. He just started and already has egg on his face, and he has no solution, because there's nothing he can offer to placate totalitarians hellbent on world domination. Even if he gave them Jerusalem, they'd start agitating for Rome.

Yeah, there's a very effective, insidious campaign to normalize the Palestinian flag and stigmatize the Israeli flag. It really should be the other way around. The Israeli flag is an ancient symbol of a Canaanite tribe that, despite being scattered around the globe for centuries, facing persecution everywhere, retained its Levantine liturgy and customs. The Palestinian flag is a highly derivative 20th-century symbol that represents little more than willful ignorance of history and the capacity for violence in service of a concocted narrative.

Despite being the child of two immigrants and the husband of another, I'm an immigration restrictionist. I think some limited, scrutinized immigration with a strong emphasis on compatibility, integration/assimilation, and demonstrable skill requirements (as in not simply the desire to pay less for certain skilled labor) is positive, but mass migration erodes public safety, per capita economic growth (see Australia), and social cohesion. Heavy irony if the EU ends mass migration before the UK.

Yeah, the messaging around this MoU is terrible. I hope that this is misdirection, but strictly evaluating the administration's communications around this war, I don't feel that Trump has effecitvely sold either the war or the MoU. Regardless, our fight continues.