Administration

Vance says ‘ball is in the Iranian court’

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by Max Rego - 04/13/26 9:00 PM ET

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by Max Rego - 04/13/26 9:00 PM ET

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Vice President Vance said Monday that the “ball is in the Iranian court” regarding the next steps toward reaching an agreement to end hostilities with the U.S.

During a roughly 20-minute interview with host Bret Baier on Fox News’s “Special Report,” the vice president said the delegation he led to Islamabad, Pakistan, left without an agreement because Iranian officials were “unable to cut a deal and they had to go back to Tehran, either from [Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei] or somebody else, and actually get approval” to the terms the U.S. side proposed.

In addition to Vance, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, were in attendance for negotiations over the weekend.

“Whether we have further conversations, whether we ultimately get to a deal, I really think the ball is in the Iranian court because we put a lot on the table,” Vance added. “We actually made very clear what our red lines were.”

As for those red lines, the vice president said they all “flow” from the “fundamental premise” of preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon.

One of those red lines, Vance said, is the U.S. taking possession of Iran’s enriched uranium, which the vice president noted is “buried underground” due to U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities last June.

Another is ensuring that Iran does not have the “ability to enrich uranium, which is how they got so close to a nuclear weapon before” those strikes, Vance added.

“Those are really the two things where frankly, the Iranians, I think, did make some progress,” he said. “They moved in our direction, which is why I think we would say that we had some good signs.”

“But they didn’t move far enough, and so what we decided is, ‘You know what? Given that we don’t think this current team and this current timeline is going to be able to make a deal, let them go back to Tehran, we’re going to go back to Washington,’ and that’s where we are today,” Vance said.

After negotiations in Islamabad concluded without a deal, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that his side “engaged in good faith” to end the war.

“But when just inches away from ‘Islamabad MoU’, we encountered maximalism, shifting goalposts, and blockade,” he wrote on social platform X, referring to the U.S. “Zero lessons earned. Good will begets goodwill. Enmity begets enmity.”

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