Vance discounts Israel’s Iran worries

Vice President JD Vance told Fox News that he doesn’t care whether or not Israel likes President Donald Trump’s  push to end the war with Iran.

“Israel may like that, they may not like that,” Vance said in reference to ongoing diplomatic talks mediated by Pakistan. “But fundamentally, we think this is in the best interest of the United States of America.”

“Over the last year and a half, we’ve created the space necessary where the president believes — and I think that he’s right — that we can get the long-term settlement to Iran’s nuclear deal,” the vice president told Fox News’ Jesse Watters.

He spoke after the Islamic Republic and its regional terrorist proxies fired multiple missile barrages at Israel from Sunday night into Monday, breaking a fragile ceasefire that had been in place since April 8.

Asked about Trump’s discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Vance said that Washington and Jerusalem “have a lot of shared interests, but we also have some situations where our interests diverge.”

Asked if the Iranian negotiators were “trying to play” their US counterparts, Vance responded, “Everybody’s always trying to play everybody.”

The White House has been “very involved in these negotiations,” he noted. “We’re going to take the attitude of: Accomplish the president’s mission — but verify over the long term that the Iranians are keeping their end of the bargain. It’s a tall order, but it’s one that the president has put us in a good position to achieve.”

The “number one thing” that was wrong with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by President Barack Obama, which Trump pulled out from in 2018, was the lack of a “proper inspections regime to ensure that the Iranians could never build a nuclear weapon,” Vance said.

“That is one of the big differences between what happened then and what the president of the United States would get to, assuming we are ultimately able to make a deal,” he added. The plan being discussed now, like the one signed by Obama, would kick a final resolution of the Iranian nuclear question down the road.         —With JNS