The U.S.–Iran war is in about its seventh month, and the argument over how it ends is now a fight over who is even in charge.
Vice President JD Vance, speaking to Reuters in Fairbanks, Alaska after a campaign trip, said Iran has to make a "meaningful" cut in its nuclear enrichment to satisfy Washington and stop the war. He asked the obvious question: if Tehran does not want a bomb, why does it need fuel enriched to 60 percent? "If you don't want a nuclear weapon, then why do you need 60% enriched fuel? And if you want to show commitment to not building a nuclear weapon, don't build highly enriched fuel. That's a very basic threshold issue," Vance said. The United States is still open to a deal, he said — "We're not going to trade words for actions." It is not open to leaving that fuel where it is.
Vance, a longtime skeptic of American involvement in foreign wars, has become the White House's lead negotiator on the conflict and brokered a provisional peace agreement in June that quickly fell apart. The war has jolted global energy markets and become a political liability for President Trump and fellow Republicans ahead of the November midterm elections. Iran and the U.S. have exchanged proposals in recent weeks aimed at ending the war and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global energy shipping route. Trump rejected Tehran's latest offer and has warned that military operations could intensify after the midterms.
Trump, a day earlier, said his "biggest problem" was that no one knows who is running Iran while the war is on. Vance echoed the confusion, saying Washington is speaking to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi but it is unclear how much authority they currently hold — Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in joint U.S.-Israeli strikes at the start of the war.
Tehran rejected that outright. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said the problem was "the opposite," pointing to "contradictory positions and mixed messaging" from U.S. officials. Washington, he said, already knows who Trump's counterpart is and how decisions get made in Iran.
A senior Iranian official then answered Vance directly: Washington's "requests and ideas" about Iran's nuclear program are at odds with Tehran's demands. Those enrichment terms are Washington's ideas and requests, the official said, and they clash with what Iran is willing to give.
Meanwhile, an adviser to Iran's Revolutionary Guards said transit routes through the Strait of Hormuz deemed illegal by Iran would soon be closed. So the war is still running, the nuclear demand is on the table, and the two sides cannot even agree on who is supposed to take the call.