JD Vance is discovering what happens when a vice president who built his political brand opposing endless wars gets tasked with ending one his boss started. The 41-year-old Catholic convert, known for invoking Christian teachings about peacemaking, now finds himself in the middle of a negotiation with Iran that hinges almost entirely on whether Tehran believes the Trump administration is serious.
The stakes are higher than typical diplomatic friction. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz during talks, a move that tanked global oil markets and signaled deep skepticism about American intentions. When Vance was preparing for a second mission to Islamabad last week to meet with Iranian negotiators, the trip was cancelled twice before being shelved altogether. Later, Trump dispatched his personal envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner instead, only to cancel that trip too, calling it a "waste of time."
What's striking is that Iran itself requested Vance lead the American side. Not Witkoff. Not Kushner. The Iranian regime singled out the vice president as the figure most likely to strike a genuine deal.
Vance's meetings with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran's parliament speaker and chief negotiator, marked the highest-level US-Iran contact since the Carter administration met with the shah in 1977. The April sessions in Islamabad reportedly made significant progress, but the goodwill evaporated almost instantly when Trump began posting triumphalist declarations on Truth Social, claiming without evidence that Iran had agreed to open the strait and surrender enriched uranium with no financial concessions.
To Iranian negotiators, Trump's social media blitz looked like either deception or chaos. For a regime that has already been attacked twice after meeting with Witkoff and Kushner, that history weighs heavily. Alex Vatanka, who heads the Iran program at the Middle East Institute, put it bluntly: "Why negotiate with these two guys that don't seem to be the most serious of figures Washington could have sent, and the fact that twice, right after meeting with them, they got bombed?"
Vance, by contrast, represents what Iran sees as a cleaner slate. He's publicly skeptical of Middle Eastern entanglements. He's seen as less aligned with Israel than Witkoff or Kushner. And critically, he could be president in 2028. That last point matters enormously in Tehran's calculation: any deal Vance champions won't simply be undone by the next administration, as Trump himself did with the nuclear agreement Obama negotiated.
The problem is that Vance can't control Trump's behavior. The president has already signaled his negotiating strategy with characteristic bluntness: "If it doesn't happen, I'm blaming JD Vance. If it does happen, I'm taking full credit."
Trump declared an indefinite ceasefire extension last week, ostensibly to give Iran's "seriously fractured" leadership time to unify. But that framing itself may have damaged trust. Vali Nasr, an international relations professor at Johns Hopkins, counters that Iran's leadership is unified, just deeply divided on whether Trump can be trusted. Ghalibaf isn't freelancing or splitting from Tehran's position. He brought a broad delegation to Islamabad precisely to represent the entire system.
The real argument happening in Tehran isn't about war or nuclear enrichment. It's about Trump himself. Negotiators there are grappling with a core question: Is he genuinely interested in a deal, or is he performing for markets and his base while preparations continue for a third round of conflict?
For negotiations to resume with any hope of success, Vance needs to convince Ghalibaf that his boss is someone worth believing. After 47 years of US-Iran estrangement, two devastating attacks that followed previous negotiating rounds, and a president prone to unpredictable social media declarations, that won't be easy.
Author James Rodriguez: "Vance may have the diplomatic skills and political positioning to unlock this, but he's been handed a broken trust that Trump himself fractured. Unless the president changes his communication style dramatically, Vance is being set up as the fall guy for talks that may have failed before they even resume."
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