Vance's greatest challenge: Making peace with Iran(1/2)
Vice President JD Vance is preparing to take on the most important assignment of his career: steering U.S. efforts to end a war he'd been concerned about waging in the first place.
Why it matters:Vance has already had multiple calls with Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu, met Gulf allies about the warand been involved in indirect communications with the Iranians. He's expected to be the top U.S. negotiator in potential peace talks.
Vance was highly skepticalofIsrael's rosy prewar assessment of how the war would unfold,and currently expects the war to continue for another few weeks, according to U.S. and Israeli sources.
Vanceadvisers think some in Israel are trying to undermine the VP,possibly because they find himinsufficiently hawkish. Israeli officials deny that.
President Trump made Vance's role official in a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, asking theVP to give an update on Iran, and noting thathe was working with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushneron the negotiations.
Zoom in:Vance's seniority in the administration and hiswell-documented opposition to open-ended conflicts overseas, White House officials say,make him a more attractive interlocutor for the Iraniansthan Witkoff and Kushner, who oversaw the two previous rounds of failed talks.
•Partly for those reasons, Witkoff recommended Vance as lead negotiator
• "If the Iranians can'tstrike a deal with Vance, they don't get a deal. He's the best they're gonna get," a senior administration official said.
• A White House official sought to tamp down the speculation, saying thatWitkoff and Kushner "are still working their lines and the VP is ready to play his partif negotiations ripen —but we aren't there yet. The Iranians need to decide if and how they want to come to the table."
State of play: On Thursday, Trump extended his deadline for negotiations with Iran, as Pakistani, Egyptian and Turkish mediators keep trying to organize in-person talks.
•Iranian officials told the mediatorsthey're still waitingfor a green light from "top leadership." If such a summit happens, Vance could sit across the table from Iran's speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
• The administration is also considering a major military escalation if diplomacy fails.
The intrigue:? Administration officials suspect foreign agents of spreading the word that Iran wants to negotiate with Vance.
• Vance adviser Andrew Surabian said on X that a CNN report to that effect wasevidence of "a coordinated foreign propaganda op."
• "It's anIsraeli op against JD,"another administration official told Axios, referring to the narrative that the Iranians seeVance as inclined to cut a deal and get out.
• There's no evidence of any such Israeli operation.
Behind the scenes:White House officials startedsuspectingthat some in theIsraeli government were trying to smear Vance after a difficult phone callonMonday between Netanyahu and Vance.
• In the call,Vance mentioned that several of Netanyahu's predictions about the war had proved far too optimistic, particularly when it came to the prospects of a popular uprising to topple the regime, according to an Israeli source and a U.S. source.
• “Before the war,Bibi really sold it to the president as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was. And the VP wasclear-eyed about some of those statements," the U.S. source said.
• The day after that call, a right-wing Israeli newspaper owned by GOP mega-donorMiriam Adelsonreportedthat Vance had yelled at Netanyahu over the issue of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
https://archive.is/rVoCt