Vice President JD Vance is heading to a face-to-face with Iranian negotiators in Islamabad, Pakistan for the highest-level direct talks between the U.S. and Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Vance will lead the American delegation Saturday alongside White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Wednesday that Vance had played “a significant and key role on Iran since the beginning” of the conflict.
Now that Vance is front and center, he has made no secret of what the U.S. expects to achieve.
“We don’t want Iran to have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon,” Vance said Wednesday boarding Air Force Two. “President Trump has also said that we don’t want Iran enriching towards a nuclear weapon, and we want Iran to give up the nuclear fuel. Those are going to be our demands during the negotiation.”
On the Strait of Hormuz, Vance gave cautious optimism and a hard warning.
“We are seeing signs that the Straits are starting to reopen,” he said. “The deal is a ceasefire, a negotiation — that’s what we give — and what they give is the Straits are going to be reopened. If we don’t see that happening, President Trump is not going to abide by our terms.”
The ceasefire deal has already been shaky, and Vance said he’s going to bring clarity to the Islamic regime on what is expected.
“The Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon and it just didn’t,” he said. “We never made that promise. We never indicated that was going to be the case.”
Vance was in Hungary when the ceasefire was announced Tuesday night, campaigning for Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s reelection.
While speaking in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, he laid out the America’s advantage and made it clear Trump is running out of patience.
“What the president has also shown is that we still have clear military, diplomatic, and maybe most importantly, we have extraordinary economic leverage,” Vance said. “The president has told us not to use those tools. He’s told us to come to the negotiating table. But if the Iranians don’t do the exact same thing, they’re going to find out that the president of the United States is not one to mess around. He’s impatient. He’s impatient to make progress.”
“This is why I say this is a fragile truce,” Vance warned. “You have people who clearly want to come to the negotiating table and work with us to find a good deal, and then you have people who are lying about even the fragile truce that we’ve already struck.”
Vance also dismissed the Iranian state media’s version of the 10-point peace proposal, where Iran claimed the U.S. had agreed to humiliating conditions. He called out legacy media for spreading the lies.
“I’ve seen various organizations like the New York Times, CNN, and others pick up and run the original 10-point proposal based on little more than a random yahoo in Iran submitting it to public access television in the country of Iran,” Vance said, “And then them saying that somehow represents the” deal.
“If the Iranians are willing in good faith to work with us, I think we can make an agreement,” Vance said. “If they’re going to lie, if they’re going to cheat, if they’re going to try to prevent even the fragile truce that we’ve set up from taking place, then they’re not going to be happy.”