Mike Pence, the man who spent four years nodding along to everything Donald Trump did, has found his spine — and he's using it to say Trump went too soft on Iran. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed flagged by Fox News, Pence called the Iran Memorandum of Understanding Trump signed last week an act of appeasement and helpfully suggested that if diplomacy fails, the Air Force should handle the rest.
The Deal That Isn't a Deal
Here's the setup. Trump, fresh off military strikes against Iran, signed an MOU with Tehran that kicks off a 60-day window for formal negotiations. The agreement is designed to de-escalate while both sides work toward something more permanent. By most diplomatic standards, getting a hostile government to sit down and talk after you've just bombed them is at least a partial win.
Pence disagrees. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, as Fox News reports, he called the MOU 'a plan to make a plan' and argued it 'falls well short of what is required to end the Iranian threat.' His view is that Iran came to the table because it was beaten, and a beaten Iran should not be getting the kind of breathing room this agreement provides.
Soft Words From the Hardest of Hardliners
To be clear, Pence does not hate everything about what Trump did here. He opens the piece by saying the president 'deserves tremendous credit for taking the fight directly to Tehran' and acknowledges that 'maximum pressure worked.' He even throws a jab at what he calls 'isolationists on the populist right' who apparently think fighting Iran was a bad idea.
But the praise stops at the negotiating table. Pence's position is essentially: great war, terrible peace. He wants the 60-day window used to lock in a complete end to Iran's nuclear program, a full stop on Iranian-backed terrorism, and what he describes as 'an end to its half-century of warfare against the U.S. and Israel.' All three. No partial credit. And if Iran won't give all of that up in two months, Pence says Trump should 'let the armed forces finish the job.'
The Word 'Appeasement' Is Doing a Lot of Work Here
Calling something appeasement is not a neutral diplomatic observation. It is a specific historical accusation that traces directly to Neville Chamberlain handing Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 and coming home to declare peace in our time. When Pence uses that word about a deal Trump signed, he is not offering constructive feedback. He is saying Trump made a catastrophic moral error.
That is a significant thing to say about a sitting president from his own former vice president, a man who spent four years attached to Trump's hip before a mob called for his hanging on January 6th. The relationship between these two has obviously not improved. But the framing here is interesting: Pence is not criticizing Trump from the left, saying the strikes were wrong or the deal was too harsh. He is criticizing him from the right, saying the strikes were correct and the deal is a betrayal of the military advantage they created.
Where This Fits in the Larger GOP Civil War
Fox News notes that Trump's Iran approach has already 'divided GOP hawks and America First conservatives over what victory looks like.' That divide is real and it is loud. On one side you have the MAGA-adjacent crowd, many of whom were skeptical of Middle East military engagement from the start, who are broadly fine with Trump taking a deal and calling it winning. On the other side you have traditional Republican foreign policy hawks like Pence who believe American military dominance should be converted into maximum diplomatic demands, not goodwill gestures.
Pence is planting his flag firmly with the hawks. He is also, whether he intends to or not, building a policy profile that looks different from Trump's. Whether that is the beginning of another presidential run or just a principled man yelling into the wind is a question only 2028 will answer.
A Hezbollah Drone Strike Hangs Over All of This
The backdrop to Pence's criticism is not nothing. According to Fox News, a recent Hezbollah drone strike killed four Israeli soldiers, and Pence cited that strike as evidence that Iranian-backed terrorism is still very much operational during what is supposed to be a de-escalation window. That is a legitimate point. If Iran is shaking hands in Geneva while its proxies are killing Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, the MOU is doing some very light diplomatic lifting.
The Biden administration caught years of grief for engaging Iran while proxy attacks continued in the region. Trump is now in a version of the same bind, and Pence is the first prominent Republican to say so out loud in print.
The Dingo Take
Let's just sit with the absurdity of this moment for a second. The man who refused to overturn the 2020 election results under literal threat of death, but otherwise spent four years as the most loyal vice president in modern American history, has decided that the hill he wants to die on is 'Trump was too nice to Iran.' Not the insurrection. Not the classified documents. Not any of the other things that might have warranted a Wall Street Journal op-ed at some point. Iran diplomacy. This is what finally pushed Mike Pence past his limits.
That said, the substance of his criticism is not crazy. An MOU is genuinely not a deal. A 60-day window to negotiate with a regime that has been lying about its nuclear program for twenty years is a long shot. And if Iran's allies are actively killing Israeli soldiers while Tehran smiles across the conference table, someone should be asking hard questions about what exactly the United States got out of stopping the bombing campaign.
What Pence is really doing, though, is staking out a position that lets him say 'I told you so' in either direction. If the 60-day talks collapse, he was right that the MOU was meaningless. If Iran pulls off another attack and Trump has to respond militarily anyway, he was right that the strikes should have continued. It is a pretty safe bet to make when you have no actual power and nothing to lose. Mike Pence found his voice. Unfortunately for everyone, it sounds exactly like a man preparing to run for president again.
