Hussein Ibish

Well, I think there are two reasons.

First of all, it gave the U.S.-Iranian face-to-face meetings in Islamabad a degree of gravitas that they otherwise wouldn't have had.

In other words, this is notably the highest level diplomatic

face-to-face meeting between a serving Iranian official, the Speaker of Parliament Ghalibaf, who's effectively their leader at this point, I guess, or at least as far as anyone can tell, and a Vice President of the United States since the 1979 revolution.

The other reason is that Vance has been, in a quiet way, the most clearly dissident member

of the Trump administration.

And there are a couple of reasons for that.

One is he's certainly of the neo-isolationist wing of the MAGA movement, but also he cannot be fired uniquely.

He's the only person around Trump who Trump cannot dismiss.

He was elected independently as vice president.

There's nothing Trump can do.

He's stuck with him.

So Vance in a way was kind of outmaneuvering Trump by

making it clear that he wasn't for this unpopular war that a lot of people think has gone very badly and in many ways has.

Trump, I think, returned the favor by saying, right, okay, it's your file now.

Let's see what you can do.

And now this way, if you have a big success, I'll be taking credit for it.

And if you don't succeed, you'll be getting the blame.

Yeah, no one expected that they would be able to even come up with a bridging.

agreement to buy an additional few weeks.