Vice President JD Vance was forced to delay a trip to Pakistan for a second round of peace talks with Iran as war negotiations once again descended into farce.
The Marine Corps veteran was expected to depart for Islamabad on Tuesday morning, but was left waiting after it became unclear whether an Iranian delegation would show up.
With each hour the vice president was delayed, the ceasefire drew closer to its end as Tehran played brinkmanship with Trump, with Vance as the pawn.
As of late morning, Iran had not yet committed to sending officials to Pakistan, hours after Donald Trump insisted, yet again, that “we’ve totally won the war.”
But the White House was left scrambling after Tehran, which had initially told mediators it would send a delegation to Pakistan on Tuesday, later said it would do so only if the U.S. lifted its blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz.
The speaker of the nation’s parliament had also warned that the regime would not negotiate while being threatened by Trump—an apparent reference to the president’s rhetoric about “lots of bombs” going off if no deal was reached.
“Trump, by imposing a siege and violating the ceasefire, seeks to turn this negotiating table—in his own imagination—into a table of surrender or to justify renewed warmongering,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf wrote on X.
“We do not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats, and in the past two weeks, we have prepared to reveal new cards on the battlefield,” he concluded.
The latest whiplash over the war came as the fragile ceasefire was set to expire on Wednesday night.
Vance reportedly had his bags packed on Tuesday, but his motorcade was spotted arriving at the White House around lunchtime, where he was set to huddle with officials to work out the next steps.
He is still expected to head to Islamabad at some point, but it is not clear when he will depart.
Confusion also gripped Washington the day before, when Trump made conflicting claims about the whereabouts of his Vice President.
On Sunday, the president said Vance wasn’t going to Pakistan to lead the peace talks with Iran due to security issues, only for his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, to tell other reporters on the record that Vance was going.
And on Monday, the befuddled president said Vance was in the air, only for his vice president to turn up at the White House.
Trump was nonetheless expressing confidence about the war when he phoned in to CNBC on Tuesday morning.
In a rambling interview, he boasted that he would secure a “great deal” with Iran but added that he had “all the time in the world” to end the war with Iran.
To assert his point, the president pulled out a list of wars and compared their time frames.
“I just looked at a little chart. World War One: four years and three months. World War Two, six years. Korean War, three years. Vietnam, 19 years. Iraq, eight years. I’m five months,” Trump said, despite the fact that the Iran conflict is now in its seventh week.
“I mean, people can play games. The Democrats, they said, ‘Well, we should have done better.’ No matter what—if I did it in one week, people would have said I should have done better.”
Pakistan has urged the U.S. and Iran to extend the two-week cease-fire and continue to work toward a diplomatic solution.
But Trump told CNBC that he wants to make sure the threat from Iran ends, even if things don’t wrap up quickly. Asked if he would allow the ceasefire to continue, he said: “I don’t want to do that.”
