Vance expects US-Iran war talks to be positive

Vice President J.D. Vance said Friday that he believes negotiations with Iran to end the six-week war will be “positive,” but warned Iran’s diplomatic team not to “leave us at their mercy.”

Vance spoke to reporters before boarding the Second Air Force at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, to fly to Pakistan for talks scheduled to begin in Islamabad on Saturday.

The sit-in comes as a two-week ceasefire that began on Tuesday is threatened by continued Israeli attacks in Lebanon and President Donald Trump’s frustration with Iran, which continues to block most shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait is the world’s most important oil transportation route. Before the war, 20% of the world’s crude oil was transported through this route.

“We look forward to negotiations,” Vance said Friday. “I think it will be positive.”

“If the Iranian side is willing to negotiate in good faith, as the president of the United States has said, we would certainly be willing to help,” Vance said.

“If they try to play us, they will find that the negotiating team is not very welcoming,” he added. “So we’re trying to have positive negotiations. The president… has given us pretty clear guidelines, so we’ll see.”

In an announcement Tuesday night, President Trump said the United States would agree to a two-week cease-fire conditional on Iran agreeing to fully and immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

But since then, shipping traffic through the strait has remained almost as severely restricted as it has been since the war began on February 28.

In a post on Truth Social Thursday night, President Trump raged: “There are reports that Iran is charging tankers to transit the Strait of Hormuz. It better not be like that, and if it is, it needs to stop now!”

Iran “is doing a disgraceful, some would say, very poor job of allowing oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” the president wrote in a follow-up post. “That’s not our agreement!”