PBS News Hour - Full Show - Vance faces first global test as U.S. negotiator with Iran

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Vice President JD Vance makes his first major foray onto the world stage as America's top negotiator with Iran. He's the most prominent isolationist in the Trump administration and his assignment puts him front and center on an issue with enormous consequences. Compass Points guest moderator Lisa Desjardins discusses more with Heather Conley, Matthew Kroenig, Curt Mills and Jeffrey Rathke. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Vice President J.D. Vance, the Trump administration's highest-ranking isolationist, makes his first major foray onto the world stage as America's top negotiator with Iran. The high-risk, high-reward assignment expands his resume for higher office and raises his international profile. The world is watching. And so are we. How is Vance perceived and how does he set aside his personal views of restraint while promoting President Trump's unyielding stance abroad? That's coming up on Compass Points. Hello and welcome to Compass Points. I'm Lisa Desjardin. Nick Schifrin is away. Vice presidents have long used appearances on the world stage to beef up their foreign policy

and national security credentials. And Vice President J.D. Vance is no different. But what makes him unique is that he's the most prominent isolationist in the Trump administration. His assignment leading talks to end the war with Iran puts him front and center on an issue with enormous consequences for America and the world. Turning us now to help us understand Vance's High Wire Act, are Heather Conley, a senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute. Matthew Cranig is a senior director of the Atlantic Council's Skowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Kurt Mills is the executive director of the American Conservative magazine. And Jeffrey Rathke is the president of the American German Institute. Thank you all for joining us. Now, as I said, Vice President Vance has landed an incredibly high-stakes assignment here, no less than trying to end a war with a 47-year American rival. After a day of talks, there was no deal about a day. That was no surprise. But I want to ask you to quick start this conversation.

How did he do, Heather? Well, I think he did well, meaning that they stuck to it for 21 hours. He laid out the American objectives and came away, said, we couldn't seal the deal. So he was put in the assignment. He kept to the objectives, and they couldn't consummate the deal. Jeff, do you agree? And did we learn anything about Vance in the deal? Well, you know, it was unrealistic to think that a single day of negotiations would lead to a resolution, given all the things that are on the table.

So in that sense, you know, the fact that he didn't come home with a victory is unsurprising. What's more interesting from my point of view is the fact that the most prominent skeptic about the Iran war was the person President Trump sent to publicly front this negotiation. And I think that speaks to the internal tensions on the U.S. side where the strategy is unclear and we haven't really made any strategic progress from my point of view. Kurt. Yeah, I mean, look, the Iranians had signaled sort of informally that they wanted to deal with Vance, that they didn't want to deal with another delegation led exclusively by Kushner and Steve Wickev. I think the administration made the right call if they want to get towards an off-ramp on the war by sending Vance.

But I think given the constraints set by both the President of the United States and our ally Israel, Vance did about as well as you possibly could because the deal that they pitched was effectively a rehash of the deal the Iranians passed on in February. So I think it's good that they're talking about more talks. I think it's good that we have a ceasefire. But unless we're willing to give, I'm not sure how we're going to avoid a resumption of conflict. Now, this is Vance 2026. Vance 24 talked about how he supported then-President Trump. candidate President Trump because he was going to keep America out of foreign wars. We're going to talk a lot about who Vance is, what we know about him. And I want to start with you, Matt. What formed Vance's worldview?

What do we know? Well, we see he's part of a new generation of American foreign policy thinkers. And we see this in the data that people of my generation and Jeff's generation, you know, we think of American foreign policy as winning World War II, winning the Cold War. I think for younger generations, they think about America's role in the world as war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, global financial crisis. And so their views are more skeptical of U.S. global engagement. And I think Vance represents that generation in that viewpoint. I heard new generation of conservative thinkers.

Does that seem accurate to you? And what do you think about Vance as an isolationist, though, in a administration that is pushing war? Is that a concern, a betrayal? I'm going to quibble with the referees terming here, but the term isolationist, I mean, this war is isolating the United States from the global stage. I mean, this war is risking U.S. position on the world stage. And so I sort of quibble with it. I think, you know, Vance is not an isolationist. Vance has defended the president's attack on a number of foreign policy endeavors.

And frankly, this war, the fact that the administration took the decision, Vance is going to take heat from the anti-war right, which I think is a real thing. thing that will have pressure if he runs either in 28 or in the future. And so I think it is actually very good that Vance is the one negotiating it. Yes, it's high risk, high reward. But if he gets his Hollywood moment in Islamabad, I think that will go a long way to healing tensions. If he doesn't, I think this administration is going to be judged rightfully for having done a dumb war. The idea of isolationism is an important one. I don't usually like to just focus on semantics, but we just heard something important. Is Vance an isolationist? Does anyone else, does anyone think so? I don't think he'd call himself an isolationist, and I think the term that many people in that camp use is restraint.

So it's not that they're opposed to U.S. global engagement. What does that mean? Well, I think in part it's a reaction to what it's not. And they look back at wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 20-year-long wars, land wars in Asia that are inconclusive. And they say that's not what we're for. And if we look at President Trump himself, we see that he is comfortable with short, sharp, decisive uses of force like in Venezuela, like with the midnight hammer strikes on Iran. But I think he, too, has always been skeptical of these more drawn-out military campaigns like

Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine. And so we'll see. I suspect that Trump wants to wind this down. I don't think he wants this to become his quagmire. We'll see, although we saw this week that his OMB chief said they have no idea, essentially, of how much money they're going to need. That doesn't, to me, portray an administration that's going to end this in the next coming weeks. And to this idea of sort of vances back and forth, Jeff, I want to ask you, do you think

it helps him as a negotiator to be in this position where he's seen as having a divergent view from the president? Is there a good cop, bad cop happening here in terms of negotiations or no? Well, I think that you can't separate the vice president's personality and his, you know, the role that he plays from the Trump administration. And so, for people who are inclined to mistrust and be skeptical of the Trump administration and the goals it's pursuing, that's also going to apply to the vice president. So there could be a little bit of a good cop, bad cop that comes up. But, you know, that is, everybody realizes that the president is the one who is ultimately going to decide.

And that if there's a success, it's going to be his success, as the president himself put it, just before the negotiation started. He said, if they don't go well, I'm going to blame J.D. Vance. He didn't say he was going to blame the Iranians. He said he was going to blame J.D. Vance. So I think that that room for maneuver is constrained, even if it does exist to some degree. Speaking to the many jobs he has in this moment, Heather, you've said that, of course, part of the vice president's job is supporting the agenda of the president overseas. I want to play what Vance said right after the Iran talks after he'd returned.

He made a ton of progress. But the reason why the deal is not. yet done is because the president, he really wants a deal where Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, Iran is not state sponsoring terrorism, but also the people of Iran can thrive and prosper and join the world economy. That's the kind of Trumpian grand bargain that the president has put on the table. Man, we're going to keep on negotiating and try to make it happen because it would be great for the world. It'd be great for our country. It'd be great for everybody. So I'm going to keep on fighting to make it happen. No nuclear weapons, no state sponsor of terrorism.

Those ideas are not different from what we've heard from other Democratic presidents. The difference is they did not go to war with Iran. Heather, how is Vance selling the idea of these strikes and this war with Iran, especially to conservatives who don't like it? Well, you've really pointed out, I think over the last seven weeks, the challenge has been this administration has just shifting the priorities. The Pentagon briefs, a set of military objectives. We've heard the president say from regime change to now no nuclear capability,

And I think this is where the vice president, I'll give you a later example of the vice president in Greenland policy, what he's trying to do is sort of navigate this full spectrum of policy objectives and trying to articulate this makes sense, this is what we're trying to achieve. So I think both Vice President Vance, Secretary Rubio, they try to provide sort of the framework,

the logical framework, but I think the president himself, who's constantly shifting, we won, we're going to stay, I'm flowing military forces in. Everyone's very confused about the key objectives. What does victory look like? Matt. I was just going to say, I think one difference with Trump 2.0 from Trump 1.0 is in Trump 1.0. Many of the cabinet officials, I think, saw themselves as saving the Republic from the president's worst instincts.

I think this time, everyone knows who the boss is. And I think J.D. Vance understands that his job is to defend the president's decisions on foreign policy. But he and his team, I think, have also been kind of clever in making it known to the press and otherwise where Vance may disagree, but publicly anyway supporting the president's decisions. I mean, as Heather pointed out, I think this doesn't get away from the strategic incoherence of the war because the objectives are constantly changing. And at least as it stands now, it looks like Iran actually is going to increase its control over an important choke point.

Exactly the kind of thing that the Trump national security strategy says it wanted to avoid is giving others control over strategic choke points. And that's where we are. It's hard for the vice president to change the president's setting of priorities. Heather mentioned Greenland. The Islamabad talks came within days after Vance had made another important international stop that was in Hungary to make a rather extraordinary endorsement right before an election for an American vice president of Victor Orban. as our viewers likely know, Orban lost by a sizable margin. So I want to ask you all, and I'm going back to you, Jeff, why did Vance do that? And did it backfire? Well, I think it backfired, yes. I think there are a few different reasons.

One, the United States, the Trump administration, has been a big supporter of Victor Orban. So, of course, they want to see him win. But talking to European politicians in recent days, They have been really outraged by the naked intervention in a European political campaign. And I think this is a reminder to them that there is that the Trump administration and perhaps the vice president personally would like to see all of these centrist governments swept from power. And that makes it pretty hard to build a constructive relationship with them when they know that he wishes. you know, you weren't actually, that they weren't actually sitting at the table.

Matt, I'm trying to read your facial expression to this. Well, I was just listening, but, you know, it is unusual for the United States to get involved in a democratic election in any other country. So, unusual. And, you know, Orban didn't win in the end, but it seemed like it was going to be hard for him to win anyway. I don't know that Vance's intervention backfired in the sense that led to Orban's losing. I think he was going to lose anyway. And I think maybe another data point that these populist movements that have been on the rise in the West over 10 years, you know, that this maybe isn't a trend that's going to continue forever. And Hungary seems to be a place where that may be reversing.

So I think this is actually where the vice president has the most coherency of linking his role in the domestic agenda of being a key rally point and spokesperson for the Republican Party, the MAGA, the new right. there's an international component of that new right, and Orbanism was central to that. And absolutely, Matt, you're right. This administration has moved away from, look, in America's interest, we want to make sure we have great relationships with all of these countries,

because we want to further U.S. interests. And when you pick a winner, you run the risk of having that backfire spectacularly. But this administration said, no, I am focusing on those who are in my ideological lane, and I'm going to put a marker down and I want them to win. It's a high-risk strategy for U.S. interests. But there's so much interconnected between the Hungarian parties. We'll see that party financing coming through as well.

Yeah, I mean, look, I agree. I'm true non-interventionist. I don't think we should be intervening any of these countries and picking winners and losers in Europe. But I think the bigger story, actually, about why Orban lost, he faced considerable headwinds, but the coup de grace was the Iran War, which is dividing the European right from the American right. Trump is fighting with Georgia Maloney. Trump is being denounced by Marine Le Penh.

Trump is even receiving criticism from Nigel Farage over the effects of the Iran War. So I think, you know, Orman might have lost, but the margin was exacerbated by a war of choice that this administration is out in front of, and I think it is making the United States a pariah internationally, especially with the European, quote, far right.

Matt, are we up pariah internationally? Well, I still think the United States is the leader of the free world, just given our capacity. And if you look at the alternatives, you know, Russia, China, they're not the good guys. And I do think that hard power has been an important part of American leadership over the past 80 years. And I think President Trump understands hard power maybe more than President Biden. And the midnight hammer strikes against Iran I thought were needed. And Iran was very close to having a nuclear weapon that set them back. And I'm not sure that Kamala Harris or another president would have done that.

Back to Vance, though, in all of this. You know, I'm not sure pariah is the right word. But I think Vance's intervention in the Hungarian election has reminded Europeans, at least those that I've been talking to, of a couple of things. One is that this isn't the first time. He's been intervening in a way that Europeans are very sensitive to. Greenland was mentioned Ukraine and now Hungary. And there's also a message in a way of failure that comes through it.

When you invest the time and the presence of the vice president to go somewhere, and it doesn't work out, you know, as one centrist, a German politician said to me today, maybe we should invite Vice President Vance to come and campaign on behalf of the AFD, and that'll take some wind out of their sales. Right, the party in Germany, yeah, exactly. Now, I also want to raise, you mentioned Germany. Another big moment for the Vice President was, of course, in Munich last year.

His speech there where he challenged, of course, our allies, offended some of our NATO allies in that speech. Now, soon after that, there was also a moment in the Oval Office with Volodymyr Zelensky. Have you said thank you once this entire meeting? No, in this entire meeting, have you said thank you? You went to Pennsylvania and campaign for the opposition in October, offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America, and the president who's trying to save your country. Then you'll see where I'm going here.

There was another challenge to a prominent world leader this week when Vance spoke about Pope Leo 14th, and he took on the Pope's criticism over the Iran war. When the Pope says that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword, there is a thousand year, more than a thousand year tradition of just war theory. Okay? Now, we can, of course, have disagreements about whether this or that conflict is just, but I think that it's important. In the same way that it's important for the Vice President of United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it's very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology. And I'll be very, very careful when I talk about that speech, and I will say that the vice president was repeatedly saying that he is, oh, he thinks the Pope's able to say whatever he wants.

But, Heather, when it comes to these challenges to not just any world leader, but some of the most look to world leaders right now, what is Vance doing here? Is he trying to prove that he has muscle, that he's tough, or is there something deeper going on? What's your take? Well, I think he's attempting to defend the president, but I think this fight with the Catholic Church is just the absolute wrong fight for both the president, whether it's a meme or questioning the Pope's ability to articulate canon law. And so this is where it's making wise choices about the battles that you pick. But, you know, the president's posture is you hit everybody hard all the time. But Vanceman made that choice in the Oval Office. It wasn't ordered to do that, I don't think.

He did. And I will say there's continuity as a senator. He has, really, in his audition, to be vice president, was very against Ukraine, very against that war, and continued to just use those divisive attacks. It's interesting, the leaders that stand their ground, Pope Leo, President Zelensky, in that, really they don't have a good response when they are confronted with a challenge. They're getting used to people backing off, but others are stepping forward now. Kurt, what about this? Is there bravado here that might be short-term, or is this more about who Vance is when he goes out on the world stage? I think the instances are delinked.

So in the op-ed that you referenced when he endorsed President Trump for re-election in 2023, he said it was basically about Ukraine policy. And so what you see from the vice president in February 25 there is that's who he is. That's what he believes. And I agree with him. Ukraine is effectively a protector of the United States. You know, yes, it was the soundbite moment, but he was basically saying, you know, you can't have it both ways. Zelensky did intervene in an election.

He campaigned for Kamala Harris. I think that was inappropriate. And I think Ukraine only exists today because of U.S. military large yes. His feud of the Pope is a defense of the Iran war, a war that he may not believe in. And so that's obviously not the greatest choice of words. Can there be an intellectually honest way to hold both of those ideas? About Iran and about Ukraine? Iran and Ukraine, non-interventionism?

Yeah. I don't think so. But, I mean, he's the vice president of the United States, not the president of the United States. And as he said in Islamabad, these are the red lines of the president of the United States, which I thought was pretty telling wording. It might be, you know, a slice of the onion a little too fine. As I mentioned, you know, I think he's going to have critics who think he's not pro-Israel enough, not pro-A-Ran war enough, and he's going to have critics who think he should, frankly,

quit the vice presidency over this war. I think he should stay. I think it's good that he's in the room. But I think other people in this administration that don't agree with the war, since Joe Kent, I think did the right decision, made the right decision, took the right decision by resigning. This war is wrong. And if you don't support it, I don't think you should be in the administration, broadly speaking.

Matt, to you. Well, I guess I'd maybe just point out that it does take to Tango. And if you go back and look at the Zelensky tape, it was Zelensky, I think, who was pushing back on the president repeatedly about the possibility of diplomacy that then led to that heated exchange. And then as a Christian, I do remember the line in the Bible about render under Caesar, what is Caesar's. And so I don't know that international security policy is something that the Pope should be weighing in on. Now the vice president does have, I think, a combative, maybe law school style debater in him that he took the challenge and engaged in the, fight, but I think it does take two to tango. Yeah, but this idea that Christianity is not political.

I mean, it's read the thing. I mean, it's the, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a argument against the Roman Empire. I mean, that, that is, that is the argument from the beginning of early Christian believers. And so this idea that the Pope wouldn't intervene in matters of political debate with foreign policy, I think is just a historical. Yeah. I mean, telling the Pope to smile more is not really a good look, especially when the U.S. the U.S. Catholic bishops in a very lengthy explanation have built on what Pope Leo has said about Catholic

Just War theory. It's pretty hard to imagine that the Vice President has a deeper grounding in that than the Catholic Church and indeed a pope who has a PhD related to the teachings of Augustine. So maybe that was just a a bit too much in defense of the administration and the vice president has to defend the president. But I think there are bigger issues that are about administration strategy that that Kurt was talking about.

In our final couple of minutes, I'm sad to say. And also I recommend previous compass points on the pope for people to look at that Nick taped a couple weeks ago. I want to talk about, do we know who J.D. Vance is? Do world leaders think they know who J.D. Vance is at this point? Or is he still, I guess you'd say, evolving? What do we think? Last couple minutes. Heather? So I think he is of a generation that we see members of Congress that fought in the Iraq War and have a worldview shaped by that conflict. And I think where there are consistencies in view, that is who he is. I think it is hard to separate his role of, in some instances the attack dog, the Munich Security Conference.

I'm going to attack Europe and their internal management while I interfere with that. But it's also, I think he, David Lammy, Deputy Prime Minister, UK, has a great relationship with him. So I think it's all these things. Yeah, last minute. I think, you know, the United States with its allies, it's like we're in a three-legged race.

We're tied together at the ankle, and our friends and partners don't know which direction we're going to head at any given moment. So what do they do? They hedge. They form other coalitions. It's not a question of trust so much as they need to have other options. And we're increasingly seeing this from America's closest friends in the way that they act in the international stage. Kurt. Matt. Some will say Vance is opportunistic or shape-shifting because he criticized President Trump 10 years ago and now he supports President Trump. But he's not the only one in the Republican Party who's done that. Marco Rubio, you could also put in that camp. on foreign policy has been more consistent over the years. Correct, last word. I think internationally he's seen as young and energetic, and I think that's seen as a good thing by our friends, allies and adversaries alike.

I think it's not a surprise that Iran wanted a deal of someone who was seen as potentially going to be the president in the future. I think headwin for Vance, though, is the rap that he is a bit of a millennial striver, and he needs to show that he is his own man, and he's going to have to form his own coalition in 28. I have to thank you all for a very smart guest for a wonderful conversation. I should keep talking, but thank you all for joining us. And that's it today for Compass Points. I'm Lisa Desjardin. We'll see you right here again next week.