Analysis
JD Vance
dispatched to negotiate Iran peace with few cards to play
Andrew
Roth
in
Washington
Vice-president’s
war doubts and his boss’s desperation to reopen Red Sea look like a weak deck
against bolstered opponents
Sat 11
Apr 2026 00.05 BST
As JD
Vance arrives in Islamabad to negotiate a peace deal with Iran, his first
high-profile assignment of the war looks to be a poisoned chalice.
Vance, a
vocal opponent of US wars in the Middle East gone quiet since the beginning of
the current military campaign, will now face off with Iranian negotiators who
feel emboldened by their new control of the Hormuz strait and their resilience
in the face of the largest US-Israeli onslaught in history. Vance’s presence at
the talks as vice-president will make it the highest-level meeting since the
Iranian revolution of 1979.
Vance’s
task is straightforward enough: to bridge the gap between a rhetorical
ceasefire in serious peril and a more durable peace. But Vance will be face a
difficult choice in Islamabad: to either undersign considerable US concessions
to Iran in order to hold the ceasefire and negotiate the opening of the strait
of Hormuz – or effectively cut off negotiations, personally backing a return to
war that is unpopular with the American public.
The
results could have a considerable impact on his expected run for the presidency
in 2028, where his Maga credentials are already in question for failing to
offer a more full-throated opposition to the war. Vance entered office calling
for a more restrained foreign policy and an end to US forever wars in the
Middle East – but the negotiations could drag him further into the largest US
intervention in the region since the beginning of the Iraq war.
Whether
the negotiations will even begin is in question. Israel’s massive strikes on
Lebanon and an apparent bait-and-switch over the country’s inclusion in the
ceasefire has angered the Iranian leadership. And Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf,
Iran’s parliamentary speaker and a lead negotiator, said that the US must also
furnish the “release of Iran’s blocked assets”, a condition for talks that the
US has not publicly agreed to.
“These
two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin,” Ghalibaf said on
Friday, less than 24 hours after the negotiations in Islamabad were due to
begin.
Those
remarks may be the first salvo of what will be a grueling experience for Vance.
Tehran’s negotiators are renowned for a long-winded, relentless approach to
deal making that Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, had once called
“market style” – meaning “continuous and tireless bargaining”. This will be
their first chance in history to subject a sitting US vice-president under
considerable pressure to cut a deal to that treatment.
Before
boarding Air Force Two en route to Pakistan on Friday, Vance said that his
negotiating team had received “clear” instructions from Donald Trump on the
negotiations, and added: “Let’s see where this goes.”
“As the
president of the United States said, if the Iranians are willing to negotiate
in good faith, we’re certainly willing to extend the open hand,” Vance told
reporters. “If they’re going to try to play us, then they’re going to find the
negotiating team is not that receptive.”
But
before the meeting, former US negotiators with Iran said that Tehran’s assumed
control of the strait of Hormuz had handed that government a powerful new
weapon in negotiations with Washington. And while the US could walk away from
the table in Islamabad, it cannot guarantee the free flow of marine traffic
from the Persian Gulf, leaving Tehran with key leverage over the White House,
as fuel shortages and a supply chain crisis could rock the global economy this
summer.
Vance’s
dispatch to Islamabad follows his trip to Hungary, where he travelled to stump
for the country’s autocratic leader, Viktor Orbán, in an election on Sunday
that he looks likely to lose, ending 16 years in power and striking a blow to
one of Maga’s key international outposts as part of a rightwing International
that has been backed by Vance.
The
Hungarians had lobbied for a visit by Trump, but they received Vance instead,
who lacks the president’s star power and was questioned for travelling on a
campaign rally to Europe even as the US administration was entrenched in the
conflict in Iran.
From the
beginning, Vance had been peripheral to the administration’s messaging about
the war in Iran. As Trump’s war team gathered at a makeshift situation room in
Florida (some termed it War-a-Lago), Vance called in from the situation room at
the White House, joined by another key anti-war voice of Trump’s
administration, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. The
secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, has regularly delivered televised briefings
on the conflict and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has been a more public
booster for the war than Vance.
“He was,
I would say, philosophically a little bit different than me,” Trump said of
Vance’s feeling about the war. “I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about
going, but he was quite enthusiastic. But I felt it was something we had to do.
I didn’t feel we had a choice.”
Now,
Vance has been tapped to end the war that he is said not to have wanted. But
his reappearance in the limelight will be fraught with risk.
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