Six weeks after President Donald Trump started a war in Iran that has proved difficult to end, he has turned to a new approach in negotiations: Putting front and center his vice president, JD Vance, whose reputation happens to be as the administration’s foremost war skeptic.
The peace talks mark Vance’s highest-profile assignment in the 14 months the administration has been in office. Vance has been a constant presence in war strategy meetings, White House officials say, and has spent much of the past week working the phones with negotiators. But the admitted “skeptic of foreign military interventions” had previously played a supporting role in Middle East affairs, behind Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
A positive outcome for the United States this weekend — a meaningful step toward ending the deadly and costly war — could boost Vance’s stock not only in the administration, but as he works out his own political plans ahead of the 2028 presidential contest.
By contrast, more failed negotiations and continued war could serve as an albatross for the ambitious vice president — and for a White House with declining approval ratings.
With multiple parties already charging each other with ceasefire violations, a deal is unlikely to be easily negotiated regardless of who is leading the U.S. side, foreign policy experts said.
While Vance prepared for the talks Friday on Air Force Two en route to Pakistan, the two-week ceasefire remained as “fragile” as the vice president had described it earlier in the week. The Strait of Hormuz remained blocked — with Iranian state media saying the strait was closed to “99% of ships” following Israel’s attacks on Lebanon — despite Trump saying Iran had agreed to reopen it.
Iran’s top negotiator, parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, meanwhile insisted that negotiations would not begin without a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran’s blocked assets.
Vance in recent weeks has been in touch with officials in Pakistan, who are mediating the negotiations. The Pakistani team encouraged the U.S. to have Vance in the lead role for the meeting, in Islamabad, according to two White House officials. Trump subsequently asked Vance to lead the negotiations.
Vance will be joined at the negotiating table by Witkoff and Kushner — with support from officials at the National Security Council, State Department and Defense Department, the White House said. He is expected to return to Washington on Sunday.
Two officials in the administration suggested that dispatching Vance will not only put a fresh face at the table with Iran, but also help show the U.S. is operating in good faith after previous rounds of negotiations ended with Trump ordering airstrikes.
“The most important aspect of having Vance in the talks is simply to convince the Iranians that it’s not just another setup — that it’s not just stalling for another attack by the U.S. on Iran, which is what happened the other two times when it was just Witkoff and Kushner,” said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, a think tank advocating for restraint.
If the person leading the U.S. talks “hasn’t gone on the record saying this war is a fantastic, great thing,” she continued, “that potentially raises the credibility of the U.S. being serious about a deal.”
White House officials, meanwhile, dispute the idea that Vance is Iran’s preferred negotiator, and call reports about it a “propaganda campaign.” Vance himself has not indicated that he intends to be any more accommodating to Tehran than others in the administration.
Speaking Friday before boarding his plane to Islamabad, Vance said he was looking forward to a “positive negotiation.”
“If the Iranians are willing to negotiate in good faith, we’re certainly willing to extend the open hand. If they’re going to try to play us, then they’re going to find that the negotiating team is not that receptive,” he said, echoing talking points he had made earlier in the week.
At that time, Vance had described his “key role” as, “I sat on the phone a lot. I answered a lot of phone calls. I made a lot of phone calls.” When asked if Iran had requested that he lead the talks in Islamabad, the vice president said he didn’t know, but “would be surprised if that was true.”
Trump, for his part on Friday, downplayed the notion that the talks would serve as a test of Vance and his political future.
“He doesn’t have to prove anything because he’s doing a very good job,” Trump told the New York Post. “He has nothing to prove.”
Ben Freeman, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based think tank that has hosted Vance in the past, said Vance differs from Witkoff, Kushner and others leading foreign policy efforts for Trump in some key ways. He has more “distance from” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Freeman said, and also Vance “gets” the downstream impacts of the war on the United States.
“The ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Vance — that guy still lives somewhere in there,” Freeman said, using the title of Vance’s memoir to describe the vice president, who grew up poor, as someone who can personally associate with the burden of the rising cost of gas and goods.
“He knows what that feels like in a way other people in that room may not. Because of that, I think he’s going to be more attuned to the American interest to stop this thing in its track than anybody else would.”
Those costs were highlighted Friday when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the worst inflation report of Trump’s second term, showing consumer prices surging at the fastest monthly pace in four years, with energy prices driving much of the increase. Administration officials dismissed the increase as temporary, noting price declines in other categories like eggs, beef and sports tickets.
In part because of higher prices, the war remains broadly unpopular with Americans. The latest Economist/YouGov poll, for example, showed that just one-third of Americans said they supported the war even “somewhat,” while 53 percent opposed it. Democrats heavily opposed the war, as did a majority of people who identified as independents — 24 percent of whom supported the war while 57 opposed it.
Two-thirds of Republicans supported the war, compared to about 1 in 5 who opposed it.
The poll found that the war was much less popular with Americans who reported that the price of gasoline near them was up “a lot” than with those who said gas prices were up just “a little.”
Analysts tempered expectations about how much progress will actually be made during the weekend’s talks. Freeman said anyone looking for “rainbows and butterflies” will be disappointed, but “small progress, some small agreement” is possible.
Kelanic predicted the likelihood of talks going poorly being “greater than 50 percent.” But she said solidifying the ceasefire could be a positive outcome as would a start on talks about what each side must do to de-escalate, such as the U.S. drawing down some forces in the region, and Iran further opening the Strait of Hormuz.
“One of the mistakes behind this entire process since Trump has assumed office is the belief that we can get this done immediately, that there needs to be dramatic developments every time there’s a sit-down at a table with a negotiator. And that’s just not how it goes,” Kelanic said.
“Negotiations are boring — they’re supposed to be boring. Just sending Vance is not going to magically restore U.S. credibility in the eyes of Iran. It’s half of a baby step, at best.”
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