Vice President JD Vance was wrapping up a two-day trip to Budapest to bolster the re-election bid of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban when President Trump presented him with the most significant international assignment of his career: leading the administration’s high-stakes peace talks with Iran.
It is the latest test for a politician who many believe hopes to succeed Trump in the White House and presents acute risks. Vance, an anti-interventionist who attempted to distance himself from the war in its early days, is now more closely tied to its outcome.
Trump deputized his vice president to lead the negotiations with the Iranians to lend a level of gravitas to the effort, according to a senior administration official
It is the latest in a series of tough tasks Trump has given his vice president in recent weeks. In addition to leading the Iran negotiations, Trump put Vance in charge of rooting out fraud and abuse in federal benefit programs. Meanwhile, Vance took the unusual move of going to help Orban campaign in Hungary, parachuting himself into a tightly contested foreign election that Orban, a darling of the far right, may lose in Sunday’s elections.
But perhaps nowhere does Vance face a tougher task than when he sits across from Iranian negotiators in Islamabad this weekend. The long-term stability of the Middle East is now tied to his ability to cut a deal in the highest-level talks between the two nations since the 1979 Islamic revolution. And Vance is the most prominent skeptic of foreign intervention within the administration.
Vance is aware that he is now inextricably linked to the war and that its outcome could have damaging political ramifications for him, according to people who have spoken to him, but he remains focused on bringing the conflict to a close. A Vance spokesman said that as the vice president heads to Islamabad he “is not thinking about this in the realm of future political considerations.”
A close friend of Vance who spoke with him recently said he described feeling like he was sometimes walking on eggshells around Trump because of his antiwar views. A Vance spokesman disputed that Vance had said that. “He’s walking on so many eggshells that he’s on his way to Pakistan at the president’s request to lead negotiations,” the spokesman said.
The Pakistanis will mediate the talks scheduled for Saturday in Islamabad. Vance will be flanked at the negotiation table by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy. Though much-diminished by six weeks of U.S. airstrikes, the regime will be represented by two seasoned diplomats: Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, and Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister who published a book early last year vowing that Iran would never surrender its nuclear capacity. The title: “Negotiations: The Power of Diplomacy.”
Vance dismissed reports that the Iranian regime had asked for him by name, telling reporters on the tarmac this week before departing Hungary, “I wanted to be involved because I thought I could make a difference.”
A senior administration official said that Trump sent Vance along with Kushner and Witkoff, who led the last round of unsuccessful talks, to demonstrate that the team was speaking on behalf of the president.
The conflict has created a political liability for a vice president who once promised “no new wars,” including one with Iran. When Trump picked Vance as his running mate, supporters heralded him as the vanguard of a New Right who would solidify Republican opposition to muscular foreign intervention. Now old allies, like conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, have turned into new critics of the administration. Trump replied recently by lashing out at those MAGA critics, calling them “losers” and “stupid people.”
Vance privately cautioned the administration against striking the Houthis in Yemen in leaked Signal chats between administration officials last year and has long expressed doubt about the prospect of regime change in Iran. Trump knows Vance’s skepticism of foreign intervention and that the vice president represents a branch of the party opposed to the hawkish positions espoused by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), a senior administration official said. Despite Vance’s beliefs, the vice president supports the mission, the aide said.
“My key role was I sat on the phone a lot,” Vance quipped recently to reporters about helping to hammer out a cease-fire. “I answered a lot of phone calls.”
A significant gulf between the two delegations remains before talks begin. The initial version of a peace proposal circulated by Iranian officials called on the U.S. to accept Tehran’s right to enrich nuclear material, a red line for the White House. The administration has since said Iran has softened some of its points. And while some oil tankers have again started to transit the Strait of Hormuz as Iran continues to maintain its grip on that waterway, Trump has warned Tehran against collecting tolls.
“You’re dealing with a regime that doesn’t fear death and sees winning as just survival,” Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said in an interview. “It’s a totally different ballgame.” The former Trump diplomat cautioned that Iran will attempt to follow a familiar playbook: “If they can delay, they buy time; if they can buy time, they make their opponent weaker.”
Trump, meanwhile, is eager to permanently reopen the strait and end the economic uncertainty that has roiled global markets. “He is impatient to make progress,” Vance said this week of the president.
Haley noted that Vance will confront more than just regional conflict. Though not at the table in Islamabad, Russian intelligence and Chinese weaponry have helped prop up the regime. “The Chinese and Russians have a lot to lose if the Iranians lose leverage,” Haley said. “They are going to try to keep the Iranian spine strong.”
A Marine who deployed to Iraq and a lawyer trained at Yale Law, the vice president is regarded inside the West Wing as Trump’s right-hand man and Trump has increasingly leaned on Vance on the diplomatic front.
A former senior Trump administration official previously involved in peace talks said that high-level negotiations would normally be the responsibility of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “You really want an American in there who is a hard-nosed son of a bitch,” the former official said. Vance will have his fingerprints all over the fallout if the U.S. ends up on the losing side of a bad deal, the official said.
The man who previously held Vance’s job, former Vice President Mike Pence, said in an interview that the White House should adopt a “trust but verify” approach to ensure that Iran is not stringing along the United States. “Any departure from the terms of the cease-fire should be met with overwhelming force,” Pence said, the kind “that at last topples this teetering and dangerous regime.”
Vance kept a relatively low profile during the early days of the war. “He decided to be extremely quiet and stay as far away from the Iran debacle as possible,” said Curt Mills, the executive director of the American Conservative Magazine, an anti-interventionist publication. “But I think basically he assessed, correctly, that he’s eating the costs of the Iran debacle, like it or not.”
A past associate of Vance, Mills hosted a party late Tuesday night to celebrate the two-week cease-fire. As current and former Trump administration officials sipped on themed cocktails like “Cease Fire Fizz” and “Greek Tragedy,” he said the pause in hostilities should have come sooner. But if Vance can negotiate a lasting peace, Mills said, “it will be a Hollywood moment in Islamabad.”
Before boarding the plane for Islamabad Friday, Vance paused to lay out expectations for the coming talks. The president “gave us some pretty clear guidelines,” he told reporters. “If the Iranians are willing to negotiate in good faith, we’re certainly willing to extend the open hand,” he said, striking a hopeful tone. “If they’re going to try to play us,” Vance cautioned “then they’re going to find the negotiating team is not that receptive.”
Write to Philip Wegmann at philip.wegmann@wsj.com