JD Vance looked tired but upbeat as Air Force Two headed home over Western Europe. The vice president had just emerged from marathon peace talks with Iran in Switzerland, and he had something to show for it. “One of the things we wanted to come out with,” he told a reporter aboard the plane, was a “channel on the Iranian side” for reducing conflict. “Which we did. They were like, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll send somebody from the IRGC to go hang out in Doha with somebody from CENTCOM,’ and that’s how we’re going to settle a lot of these disputes.”
The deal – a direct line between Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and US Central Command in Doha – comes as US envoys travel to Doha for what The Independent described as “high-level peace talks”. The channel, if it works, could also serve as Vance’s electoral lifeline. Politically, Trump’s Iran war has been the biggest conundrum of the vice president’s career. He is seen, rightly, as the team captain of the “restrainer” faction within the Trump administration — reluctant to intervene abroad and seeking a rebalancing of US power toward the homeland. Suddenly, he had to defend an outright hot war with Iran.
“JD Vance secured a direct Iran-US channel for conflict reduction after marathon talks in Switzerland.”
By disposition, Vance has to constantly tell a cohesive story about why he’s taking a given position at a given moment. As he spoke, his wife, Usha, lay on the nearby bed, heavily pregnant, now reading, now tuning into the conversation, now dozing off. Vance himself had exchanged his suit and tie for a sweater and jeans. The question is whether this channel can turn the narrative around – or whether the war has already written it for him.