No deal

0:01Noel King:The U.S. did not get a deal with Iran this weekend. The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement. And I think that's bad news for Iran much more than it's bad news for the United States of America. The bad news for Iran is an American blockade effective as of this morning of the Strait of Hormuz. So that Iran will not be able to sell oil. Which Iran, you may recall, is also blockading. Fox asked Trump about the consequences. Is this going to be enough to lower the price of oil and gas, sir? Well, it's going to be eventually it's going to be lower. No, it might not happen initially, but it's going to it's going to go down.

0:36Noel King:Oil is up over$100 a barrel today. Coming up on Today Explained, the art of no deal.

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2:05I'm Dave Lawler. I'm the National Security Editor at Axios.

2:09Noel King:All right. So J.D. Vance was the lead negotiator for the U.S. Some classic good pictures of J.D. Vance came out of this, if little else. How did Vance do? What's the consensus? So hard to say how he did inside the room. I think the fact that he put his hand up for this assignment is interesting. We reported that Vance personally told Trump that he wanted to be involved in the Iran diplomacy. He was one of the more skeptical voices inside the administration about this war to begin with. And the Iranians actually made clear that they preferred to deal with him than Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who led the two previous rounds of negotiations, which ended in Iran being bombed, right?

2:52So not a great track record from the Iranian perspective on dealing with those guys. We didn't get a deal from Vance. He certainly was brief in his public statements after the talk. I think it was a three-minute press conference. We leave here with a very simple proposal, a method of understanding that is our final and best offer. We'll see if the Iranians accept it. Thank you. So we don't have a lot of color in terms of what he was like inside the room. The Iranians have suggested they felt like they were making headway in the talks until the U.S. moved the goalposts. That's their characterization.

3:28Vance also said that he spoke to Trump a half dozen times, at least over the course of those 21 hours. They also spoke to Secretary Rubio, Secretary Besant. So he was making calls back to Washington to check in, which suggests that this didn't go nowhere, right? I mean, if nothing was moving in the talks, you wouldn't have to keep checking in with the stakeholders back in Washington, or in Trump's case in Miami, I should say.

3:51Noel King:Vice President J.D. Vance and his delegation were engaged in 21 hours of high stakes negotiations with Iran, President Trump flew to Miami to enjoy the UFC's light heavyweight championship fight. With us in the building tonight, the 45th and now 47th president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. So, you know, Vance is still in charge of this operation. It's not over. Both sides have suggested that negotiations could resume at some future date. We have no reason to expect it won't be Vance in the room. And this is really by far the biggest assignment of his political career. Making peace with Iran is a pretty big thing for the vice president to take on.

4:41And somebody who clearly has ambitions beyond the vice presidency, this will be quite a big test for him.

4:47Noel King:Yes. And so the question really is, why him? Like, President Trump could have picked any number of people, including some who have expertise in Iran, although there are fewer in his administration than there were in the past. But why Vance? Yeah, so a couple different reasons for that. One is that Steve Whitcoff has had this file for a while. He and Vance get along quite well. We have some reporting that he suggested that Vance be the one to take over if it wasn't going to be him. Again, Vance did tell Trump that he wanted to be involved in the diplomacy here. And, you know, I think part of it is that the Iranians don't trust this administration at all, but they have more reason to distrust some other people other than J.D.

5:32Vance, right? Even Secretary Rubio, it's interesting that the Secretary of State is not personally involved in these face-to-face talks. But he has a history as an Iran hawk. Vance does not now. He has stuck quite close to the president in everything he's done over the course of his almost, I guess, a little over a year now in the vice presidency. I think what this Board of Peace represents is a recognition that if you actually have a president of the United States and a team that's committed to diplomacy, it can actually work. Do you think that it's respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?

6:11So you're not going to see him publicly break with Trump and say, the president wants to bomb you, but I actually think we should make peace. You know, he'll he'll keep up the party line. But it's an interesting dynamic that he was one of the more skeptical voices about doing this whole thing in the first place. And now he's the one in charge of making peace.

6:31All right.

6:32Noel King:So there were two other names above the fold alongside Vance's. You mentioned Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Let's start with Witkoff. What was he doing there? Yeah, so Witkoff is a longtime friend of Trump's. They have some shared history in terms of the fact that they have built a lot of golf courses and luxury properties. They go back a long ways. They're both in the developer game. And Witkoff, in Trump's view, is a dealmaker. He certainly didn't come in with any particular expertise on Gaza, on Ukraine, on Iran. And yet Trump gave him all three. You know, he it's a mixed track record up to now.

7:10They did get a ceasefire in Gaza, although there's been issues on the back end, as you would expect, I suppose.

7:16Noel King:Tonight, we celebrate something extraordinary, a moment that many thought was impossible. He's certainly taking criticism for how he handled Ukraine. That is an area where there's not been a lot of progress and where he has been accused by some of the more skeptical voices of the president's approach of being too willing to believe what Vladimir Putin was putting on the table, too sympathetic to the Russian perspective. Witkoff truly shamed himself by acting like a total dupe, a Putin fanboy. Of course, he would deny that. Trump would deny that. And now on Iran, he led two rounds of nuclear talks with the Iranians, one last year, one earlier this year in the immediate lead up to the bombing campaign.

8:00Neither of those have produced a deal, though Whitcoff, you know, he does have a very sunny, optimistic demeanor when he talks about these things. It always seems like a deal is right around the corner, or at least that he believes a deal is right around the corner. That has not happened on Iran. It hasn't happened on Ukraine. But I'm not sure his optimism is entirely diminished that he can play some role in getting to a resolution here.

8:26Noel King:And then he went to Jared, if I may. Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner. What is his deal? What is he good at? Why is he at the table? So President Trump thinks very highly of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. I think he thinks he's, oh, what a smart kid. He said that publicly. He said it privately. Where is Jared? Is he here, by the way? I'd love to introduce him. He did such a great job on Middle East Peace. You see what we're doing there? Middle East Peace? He was actively involved, officially involved in Trump 1.0. He was responsible for negotiating the Abraham Accords, but also had a whole number of files.

9:06He was sort of the minister for everything. If there was something that he thought he could move the ball on, he basically had the president's blessing to get in there and do it. this time around, he has no official government role, but kind of a similar set of parameters where he does seem to have the president's blessing to speak on behalf of Trump and to try to make these international negotiations happen. So he has worked side by side with Whitcoff on these negotiations. And it's an interesting sort of buddy act. They have occasionally done briefings with reporters on these things. And Whitcoff is sort of sets the mood a little bit, talks in broad strokes about how it's all going, usually, as I said, pretty optimistic.

9:49And then Kushner is a little bit more in the details. He, I think, has studied up to some degree on these issues, not to say Wyckoff hasn't, but he does, you know, he has some level of technical understanding and knowledge of the various issues which he's being tasked to negotiate. Now that the war is over, if you want to integrate Israel with the broader Middle East, you have to find a way to help the Palestinian people thrive and do better. One of the things that is valuable for Jared, even if you're negotiating with him, you can be pretty confident that this guy has the ear and has the confidence of the president, right?

10:24You're not negotiating with the junior undersecretary for something or other where you don't know if they can deliver what they say at the table. I think Kushner clearly has a close relationship with his father-in-law and is able to speak credibly on behalf of the president of the United States.

10:40Noel King:Are Kushner and Witkoff proving to be good at diplomacy? I think, you know, if you were going to make a case for, let's say, for Kushner, you would say, you know, he is a realist in terms of what can actually be achieved. He doesn't try to strike these broad kumbaya bargains. In terms of Gaza, they did get a ceasefire there. It hasn't lived up to, you know, their sort of grander ambitions so far for what the region would look like after a ceasefire was achieved. But, you know, he did get an agreement there working with Whitcoff. The critics, and in particular of Whitcoff, he has been accused of sort of freelancing, Like going in not with a clear plan.

11:32He showed up in Moscow once famously without his own interpreter and had to use an interpreter from the Kremlin, basically, which, you know, drew some some eyebrow raising. That's not typically how, you know, diplomacy is often quite by the book. Right. If you're if you're operating out of the State Department, you know, there is a way that you do these things. And Witkoff does it differently. Kushner, to some degree, does it differently. Whitcoff flies around on his private plane. You know, it's just the whole thing is very Trump style diplomacy. And yet, you know, they would say, has it really worked that well the way that everybody else has done diplomacy?

12:10You know, give us a shot to do it our way. So we're a year in. They've had a lot of I mean, I don't even know if you kind of one thing you cannot accuse these guys, particularly Whitcoff of being is lazy or lacking the energy for this job. They've had weekends where Kushner has hosted the Russians and the Ukrainians and the various parties to the Gaza negotiations at the same weekend at his golf course and just gone meeting to meeting, meeting to meeting all weekend long. You know, they really do have a seem to have a bit of a relish for doing this. Whitcoff seems to enjoy it to some degree. But whether ultimately we'll look back on the Trump administration and say these were the two right guys to be doing this, maybe it's too early for us to say.

13:00All right.

13:01Noel King:So what happens next? Are there more talks? Does the ceasefire keep ceasing? I think the question is, does either party feel like enough progress was made or enough sort of trust was developed in that first round of talks that they think we can get there? Or do they feel like this was proof that the other side can't be trusted and we just have to, you know, keep going along, escalating potentially militarily until we get to a point where it's clearer how the war is going to end? But, you know, if the Iranians don't move, do we just keep doing this for weeks and weeks? It's possible, but I don't think it's anybody's preferred outcome.

13:52Noel King:That was Dave Lawler of Axios. Coming up, making a deal with Iran is very, very, very hard. We're going to talk to the last person to pull it off.

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17:40Noel King:This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Ambassador Wendy Sherman, quasi-retired former deputy secretary of state, led the team that in 2015 got a nuclear deal with Iran. We said they could only have so many kilograms of a stockpile, not enough for a nuclear weapon, that there would be extensive monitoring and verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and other countries would begin to be able to do commerce inside of Iran. The U.S. still had an embargo, but that would put our European colleagues on the ground in Iran. And we hoped over time that might open up channels to work on several other issues as well.

18:25And we knew at the time, if we could not make a deal, then we might find ourselves in military conflict, and it would be terrible.

18:36Noel King:All of the things that have happened now, we knew would happen. All right. So to take listeners back in time just a little bit, after the deal is signed in 2015, President Trump comes into office and he essentially tosses it out. He says, I'm going to create something better. Now, to this day, he hasn't. And now there is a new war standing in the way of a new deal around Iran's nuclear program. What do you think it would take for the U.S. to get a new deal with Iran right now? It really depends on what the objectives are for the president of the United States and for Iran. Right now, what President Trump has said is he wants to make sure Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon.

19:18Noel King:He wants to make sure they don't have missiles or the development of missiles that could reach the United States. They could bring a nuclear weapon our way. He wants to open the Strait for Moose. He wants to stop Iran from funding proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, because he thinks they create a risk for Israel, who is our ally, and create a risk for all of the countries in the Gulf region. That's a lot of things to want. Iran, on the other hand, now sees that it has control of the Strait of Hormuz, And so they're looking to maintain that leverage because it allows them to project power in the region.

20:03Noel King:They want to ensure that they maintain a right to enrichment. The United States does not believe countries have a right to enrichment. And they want to be able to continue to have relationships with Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis. So there's a big gap, and it's sort of curious because the negotiation team on our side is quite small. The negotiation team on their side includes people like Abbas Arachi, who was my counterpart during the 2015 negotiations, and he's now the foreign minister, and he knows every single detail of that deal. Okay, so there are no easy answers to the question, how do you get this done?

20:55Noel King:All right, so let's go back in time and talk about how you did get it done. As you say, today Iran has some real serious leverage. It has the Strait of Hormuz and the ability to close it, and we know that it will act on that. Back when you were negotiating with Iran, were there moments looking back when you thought, this is just not going to happen? We're just not going to get this done. Absolutely. There were many points along the way where I said to my counterparts, if you can't do it, you can't do it. We'll just see where we go from here. We thought we were very close to a set of parameters.

21:38That means sort of a framework for doing the final details of the deal.