Iran has consented to give United Nations inspectors access to its nuclear facilities after two days of negotiations in Switzerland, Vice President JD Vance said Monday.
Speaking to reporters in Lucerne before departing for Washington, Vance said the discussions had created a strong starting point for what he described as a possible final agreement.
He compared the prospective deal to a house, saying negotiators had not yet completed the structure but had put in place the groundwork needed to reach an outcome he said would serve Americans well.
Vance also asserted that both sides had put in place channels for addressing tensions involving the Strait of Hormuz and the newest cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which still appeared to be intact Monday morning.
He offered few specifics about those arrangements, saying only that they involved the parties communicating directly and working out how to halt the violence.
The vice president added that Iranian funds released under any eventual peace agreement could be directed toward buying U.S. soybeans, corn and wheat, which he said would benefit ordinary Iranians.
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Vance said the proposal came from President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, working with Qatari mediators, and described it as a typical Trump-style bargain: if Iranian assets are unlocked, the money would support American farmers while helping feed people in Iran.
He said such an arrangement would be good for Americans, beneficial for Iranians and would further strengthen what he called the regional security framework the administration had built and intended to preserve.
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.
