Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The U.S. did not get a deal with Iran this weekend.
Chapter 2: What happened during the U.S. negotiations with Iran?
The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement. And I think that's bad news for Iran much more than it's bad news for the United States of America.
The bad news for Iran is an American blockade, effective as of this morning, of the Strait of Hormuz.
So that Iran will not be able to sell oil.
Which Iran, you may recall, is also blockading. Fox asked Trump about the consequences. Is this going to be enough to lower the price of oil and gas, sir?
Oil is up over $100 a barrel today.
Coming up on Today Explained, the art of no deal.
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Chapter 3: How does the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz affect Iran?
This is Today Explained.
I'm Dave Lawler. I'm the national security editor at Axios.
All right. So J.D. Vance was the lead negotiator for the U.S. Some classic good pictures of J.D. Vance came out of this, if little else. How did Vance do? What's the consensus?
So hard to say how he did inside the room. I think the fact that he put his hand up for this assignment is interesting. We reported that Vance personally told Trump that he wanted to be involved in the Iran diplomacy. He was one of the more skeptical voices inside the administration about this war to begin with.
And the Iranians actually made clear that they preferred to deal with him than Steve Woodcoff and Jared Kushner, who led the two previous rounds of negotiations, which ended in Iran being bombed, right? So not a great track record from the Iranian perspective on dealing with those guys. We didn't get a deal from Vance. He certainly was brief in his public statements after the talk.
I think it was a three-minute press conference.
We leave here with a very simple proposal, a method of understanding that is our final and best offer.
We'll see if the Iranians accept it. Thank you. So we don't have a lot of color in terms of what he was like inside the room. The Iranians have suggested they felt like they were making headway in the talks until the US moved the goalposts. That's their characterization. Vance also said that he spoke to Trump. a half dozen times, at least over the course of those 21 hours.
They also spoke to Secretary Rubio, Secretary Besant. So he was making calls back to Washington to check in, which suggests that this didn't go nowhere. Right. I mean, if nothing was moving in the talks, you wouldn't have to keep checking in with the stakeholders back in Washington or in Trump's case in Miami, I should say.
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Chapter 4: What role did Vice President J.D. Vance play in the negotiations?
you know, his almost, I guess, a little over a year now in the vice presidency.
I think what this Board of Peace represents is a recognition that if you actually have a president of the United States and a team that's committed to diplomacy, it can actually work. Do you think that it's respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
So you're not going to see him publicly break with Trump and say the president wants to bomb you, but I actually think we should make peace. You know, he'll he'll keep up the party line. But it's an interesting dynamic that he was one of the more skeptical voices about doing this whole thing in the first place. And now he's the one in charge of making peace.
All right. So there were two other names above the fold alongside Vance's. You mentioned Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Let's start with Witkoff. What was he doing there?
Yeah. So Witkoff is a longtime friend of Trump's. They have some shared history in terms of the fact that they... have built a lot of golf courses and luxury properties. They go back a long ways. They're both in the developer game. And Witkoff, in Trump's view, is a dealmaker. He certainly didn't come in with any particular expertise on Gaza, on Ukraine, on Iran, and yet Trump gave him all three.
You know, it's a mixed track record up to now. They did get a ceasefire in Gaza, although there's been issues on the back end, as you would expect, I suppose.
Tonight... We celebrate something extraordinary, a moment that many thought was impossible.
He's certainly taking criticism for how he handled Ukraine. That is an area where there's not been a lot of progress and where he has been accused by some of the more skeptical voices of the president's approach of being too willing to believe what Vladimir Putin was putting on the table, too sympathetic to the Russian perspective.
Utkoff truly shamed himself by acting like a total dupe
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Chapter 5: Why did Trump choose J.D. Vance for this assignment?
This is Today Explained.
I'm Noelle King with Ambassador Wendy Sherman. Quasi-retired former Deputy Secretary of State led the team that in 2015 got a nuclear deal with Iran.
We said they could only have so many kilograms of a stockpile, not enough for a nuclear weapon. that there would be extensive monitoring and verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and other countries would begin to be able to do commerce inside of Iran. The U.S.
still had an embargo, but that would put our European colleagues on the ground in Iran, and we hoped over time that might open up channels to work on several other issues as well. And we knew at the time, if we could not make a deal then we might find ourselves in military conflict and it would be terrible. All of the things that have happened now, we knew would happen.
All right. So to take listeners back in time just a little bit, after the deal is signed in 2015, President Trump comes into office and he essentially tosses it out. He says, I'm going to create something better. Now, to this day, he hasn't. And now there is a new war standing in the way of a new deal around Iran's nuclear program. What do you think it would take for the U.S.
to get a new deal with Iran right now?
It really depends on what the objectives are for the president of the United States and for Iran. Right now, what President Trump has said is he wants to make sure Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon. He wants to make sure they don't have missiles or the development of missiles that could reach the United States that could bring a nuclear weapon our way. He wants to open the Strait of Hormuz.
He wants to stop Iran from funding proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, because he thinks they are create a risk for Israel, who is our ally, and create a risk for all of the countries in the Gulf region. That's a lot of things to want.
Iran, on the other hand, now sees that it has control of the Strait of Hormuz, and so they're looking to maintain that leverage because it allows them to project power in the region. They want to ensure that they maintain the a right to enrichment.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did the U.S. face in negotiating with Iran?
And I think part of the reason the vice president is there is because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Jared Kushner who has no former role in the government, they don't have credibility with Iran because twice before when they were negotiating with Iran, we attacked.
And it's hard to believe that someone's going to keep negotiating with you if two other times they've attacked in the midst of negotiations.
Iran's current demands, if the U.S. agrees to them, would put Iran in better shape than they were before the war. Lifting of sanctions they're asking for, control of the Strait of Hormuz they're asking for, the U.S. pulls out of its Middle Eastern bases they're asking for. I don't hear you saying that the U.S. came out weaker after the 2015 deal.
Is there a risk this time around that that's exactly what happens? The U.S. comes out weaker and Iran comes out stronger?
I think it's very hard to be that reductive on both counts. There are parts of Iran that are weaker. There's no doubt. They don't have the Navy they once had. They don't have the missile programs they once had. They don't have the nuclear programs they once have. They can rebuild all of that.
And if they get millions of dollars in tolls and sanctions relief from the United States, they will be able to rebuild all that capacity faster. But in the moment, they have been set back. The United States definitely, in my view, has been set back. We have just spent billions of dollars. We have reduced our inventory of weapons that we may need for other theaters.
We have undermined our alliances. We have put Russia and China in stronger positions. We have removed sanctions, oil sanctions from Russia and oil sanctions from Iran already, putting money in their coffers, giving Russia more money so they can prosecute their horrible war, an illegal war against Ukraine. I could go on and on about the challenges and, of course, two really important things.
All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks and Iranian citizens who do want freedom. The original reason why President Trump said he would, quote, unquote, have their backs have been completely forgotten in this process.
The regime in place in Iran now is more hardline than the one before, if you can believe it, even more hardline, and may decide it must have a nuclear weapon in order to deter future attacks. And if Iran decides it wants a nuclear weapon and will go for a nuclear weapon, I can assure you
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