U.S. Vice President JD Vance sounded a warning on competing factions within Iran, with some open to good faith negotiation with the U.S. in the coming weeks and other spoilers, in comments to a Hungarian university.
The Mathias Corvinus Collegium received apologies from the U.S. Vice President for his late arrival on Wednesday morning, given he had been up “very late last night” negotiating a temporary truce between the United States, Iran, and Israel. Even before that ceasefire got off to a bumpy start as Wednesday wore on, with apparent confusion over what the agreement actually contained, Vance warned his audience that the “fragile truce” was under threat from spoiler elements inside Iranian society who don’t want peace to succeed.
Hailing the achievements of the U.S. military in the conflict to date, Vance reflected he had “learnt a lot about the Iranian system, and a lot about the way the Iranians negotiate” over the course of talks so far and explained that there were several competing factions within Iranian society, and that while the U.S. had been speaking to what seemed to be the most powerful — the Iranian foreign minister — others were dead-set against peace with America. He said:
…just in the response we’ve seen in the various segments of Iran, you have on one hand people who have responded very favourably, the Foreign Minister who said ‘we agree to the United States terms, we’ll do a ceasefire, we’ll do a negotiation, we’ll open the Strait of Hormuz, we’ll see if we can come to more agreement down the road’.
Some of the people have responded favourably and have said the right things, and then you have some people on social media within their system who are basically lying about what we have accomplished militarily, they are lying about the nature of the agreement, they are lying about the nature of the ceasefire.
So you have, even within their system, and this is why I say this is a fragile truce, you have people who clearly want to come to the negotiating table and work with us to find a good deal, and then you have people who are lying about even the fragile truce that we have already struck. And that’s the interesting thing about their system… Ultimately, it’s up to the Iranians how to negotiate, I hope they make the right decision.
Vice President Vance said President Trump had instructed him and the team to negotiate in good faith and to allow the Iranians to come forward and do the same, and that the U.S. team shouldn’t lean too heavily on its military and economic advantages unless the Iranians proved unwilling to approach things with an open mind. Vance revealed he’d been warned ahead of talks by Donald Trump that “the Iranians are better negotiators than they are fighters”, but that if they weren’t negotiating in good faith, they would discover “the President of the United States is not one to mess around”.
Later in the day, Vice President Vance reflected on the rocky start of the ceasefire, stating that while it was up to Iran to give up on it almost immediately, that would be “dumb” of them.
Vance’s morning comments came at an address to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, a visit to Hungary days before the country is due to vote in national elections that are predicted by some to be close-run. The massive levels of attempted influence in Hungary from the European Union — which has been at loggerheads with Prime Minister Viktor Orban for years — was cited by Vance, who said the United States chose not to resort to “garbage” under-hand tricks, but which nevertheless showed support for its friends.
Vice President Vance said:
… we would never do that because we respect our friends enough to respect their democratic will. What’s going on in the EU, what’s going on in Brussels, what’s going on with these foreign influence operations, I’m telling you it’s a scandal. It’s the reason I am here.
This is unprecedented, it’s unprecedented for a U.S. Vice President to come the week before an election and the reason we’re doing it is there’s so much garbage going on against Viktor and this election that we had to show that there are actually a lot of people, a lot of friends across the world that recognise that Viktor and his government are doing a good job and they are important partners for peace. That’s why we’re here but ultimately the Hungarian people are sovereign because that’s how it should be.
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