Iran has agreed to allow United Nations inspectors access to its nuclear sites following two days of talks in Switzerland, Vice President JD Vance announced Monday.
“We laid a very good foundation for a successful final deal,” Vance told reporters in Lucerne before returning to Washington.
“The final deal is the house. We set the foundation, we haven’t built the house, but we’ve laid a successful foundation to get to a good place for the American people.”
The vice president also claimed that the two sides had established “mechanisms” to resolve disputes over the Strait of Hormuz as well as the latest cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon — which appeared to be holding as of Monday morning.
Vance did not elaborate on what those “mechanisms” were beyond “actually talking to each other and figuring out how to stop the shooting.”
He also stated that any Iranian assets that are unfrozen as the result of a final peace deal could be used to purchase American soybeans, corn and wheat “for the benefit of the Iranian people.”
Vance credited President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with coming up with the idea alongside mediators from Qatar, calling it “a classic Trump deal, where if Iranian assets are ever unfrozen, they’re going to go to make American farmers richer and to feed the Iranian people.
“That’s a very, very good and very classic Trump deal that’s great for our people, great for the people of Iran, and fundamentally, again, will contribute to this regional security architecture that we’ve built, and that we’re going to work very hard to ensure that it endures,” he added.
Vance’s comments Monday followed a series of blistering statements from Trump Sunday, including a threat to seize the Strait of Hormuz and “blow the s–t out of” Iran.
The VP confirmed Monday that the comments by the president had caused the Iranians to “threaten to walk out, or at least there were social media threats that they would walk out, but we were negotiating well past one in the morning yesterday, so they didn’t walk out, and their technical team is still here.”
Vance ultimately shrugged off the comments, telling reporters: “What we told the Iranians yesterday is, ‘When you guys engage in what us millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record,’ so when they say things that aren’t true, the president is going to respond to it, I’m going to respond to it, Americans are going to respond to it.
“When they make threats that aren’t rooted in reality, they have to accept that the president of the United States is actually going to set the record straight. That’s all that happened. So, yes, there was a little bit of threatening, there was a little bit of whining, but at the end of the day, the talks continued, and we made great progress.”
In a joint statement ahead of Vance’s remarks, mediators from Qatar and Pakistan said that while high-level negotiations had wrapped up, technical talks would continue with Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff taking the lead for the Americans.
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