Vance Talks Nonsense on the Nuclear Issue

The administration shouldn’t send Vance out to talk about foreign policy.

The administration shouldn’t send Vance out to talk about foreign policy. The vice president was talking this week about Iran and its nuclear program, and he can’t even get the basic facts right:

"But this is going to end somewhere, and it will end either in Iran eliminating their nuclear program -- their nuclear weapons program [bold mine-DL]," Vance said. "They can have civil nuclear power. Okay. We don't mind that. But let me ask this basic question – which regime in the world has civil nuclear power and enrichment without having a nuclear weapon? And the answer is no one [bold mine-DL]."

Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program, so there is no way that it can eliminate something that it doesn’t have. The Iranian government could be forgiven for being unsure of what Washington’s bottom line is when top U.S. officials talk about a weapons program that our government’s own intelligence agencies say hasn’t existed for more than twenty years. How can Iran negotiate with an administration this divorced from reality?