Here is a complete text of the JD Vance statement to media after talks on Sunday.
Good morning, everybody. And let me say a couple of notes of appreciation.
First of all, to the Prime Minister of Pakistan and to Field Marshal Munir, who were both incredible hosts. And whatever shortcomings of the negotiation, it wasn’t because of the Pakistanis, who did an amazing job and really tried to help us and the Iranians bridge the gap and get to a deal.
We have been at it now for 21 hours, and we’ve had a number of substantive discussions with the Iranians.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement, and I think that’s the bad news for Iran much more than it’s the bad news for the United States of America. So we go back to the United States having not come to an agreement.
We’ve made very clear what our red lines are, what things we’re willing to accommodate them on, and what things we’re not willing to accommodate them on.
And we’ve made that as clear as we possibly could, and they have chosen not to accept our terms.
Questions.
Specifically, what have they rejected here? Can you help us understand it a little bit?
Well, I won’t go into all the details because I don’t want to negotiate in public after we negotiated for 21 hours in private. But the simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.
That is the core goal of the President of the United States, and that’s what we’ve been trying to achieve through these negotiations.
Again, their nuclear program, such as it is, the enrichment facilities that they’ve had before, they’ve been destroyed. But the simple question is, do we see a fundamental commitment of will for the Iranians not to develop a nuclear weapon, not just now, not just two years from now, but for the long term? We haven’t seen that yet. We hope that we will.
We talked about all those issues, Jen, and we talked about a number of issues beyond that. Things came up, but again, we just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms. I think that we were quite flexible, we were quite accommodating.
The President told us, you need to come here in good faith and make your best effort to get a deal. We did that, and unfortunately, we weren’t able to make headway.
Preston.
Mr. Vice President, how often did you communicate with President Trump throughout the negotiations? There are reports that there were multiple rounds where there were breaks in between negotiations.
How often did you communicate with the President throughout those rounds, and what was he saying as you were going through these negotiations that you said fell short?
Obviously, we were talking to the President consistently. I don’t know how many times we talked to him, a half dozen times, a dozen times over the past 21 hours. We obviously also talked to Admiral Cooper, to Pete, to Marco, to the entire national security team. We talked to Scott Peterson a number of times. So look, we were constantly in communication with the team because we were negotiating in good faith.
Thank you