A Bad Day for JD Vance As Peace Talks Stall and He Misses Out on UFC Fight
At their peace talks in Pakistan, the US presented Iran with an offer it could refuse. While that doesn't necessarily mean the end of a shaky ceasefire, it doesn't bode well for their ongoing conflict.
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Vice President JD Vance, the head of a high-level US delegation that also included Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a real estate developer the president knows, left Pakistan on Saturday night after not having been able to reach a permanent deal with Iran that would end the war between the two countries and Israel.
“We have had a number of substantive negotiations with the Iranians. That’s the good news,” Vance said. “The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement. And I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America.”
The outcome is hardly a surprise… and not only because the US dispatched a bunch of amateurs to the talks. Even seasoned diplomats would have trouble negotiating on behalf of a president who is so erratic that he goes from trying to calm markets to promising the annihilation of an entire civilization within minutes.
In addition, it is also abundantly clear that both parties have widely diverging views of the terms of their ceasefire agreement, with Iran saying that the US accepted its wish list of terms and Trump making various contradictory statements.
It doesn’t help that Israel appears to have no interest in stopping its attacks on Lebanon.
In remarks to reporters, Vance insisted that he drove a hard bargain.
“We’ve made very clear what our red lines are, what things we’re willing to accommodate them on and what things we are not willing to accommodate them on,” he said. “We have made that as clear as we possibly could, and they have chosen not to accept our terms.”
The main issue for the US, according to the vice president, is Iran’s nuclear program, which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” last June before changing his tune and saying Tehran was only weeks away from obtaining a nuclear bomb.
“I won’t go into all the details, because I don’t want to negotiate in public after we negotiated for 21 hours in private, but the simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon,” Vance added.
We suppose he means an agreement along the lines of the Iran nuclear deal that Trump voided during his first term.
But not only did Vance (predictably) fail to negotiate a lasting peace in the Middle East within 24 hours, he also missed out on attending a UFC fight with Trump and, inexplicably, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
For the former Florida senator, this event was quite a coup (not the January 6 kind). While Vance was unsuccessful in Pakistan doing Rubio’s job, the secretary of state got to hang out with the GOP’s kingmakers — the president, and podcaster Joe Rogan.
We don’t know how he finagled that, but it is the kind of savvy the US could use at the negotiating table.
