Vice President JD Vance was not traveling to Switzerland on Thursday night for the planned technical talks on the next phase of the U.S.-Iran agreement, the White House said, even as it insisted the delegation was ready to leave at the first available opportunity. The move leaves the start of the next round of negotiations up in the air after President Donald Trump signed an interim deal this week.
The timing matters because the talks were supposed to build the outline of a larger arrangement, and readers were already looking for what comes next after the 14-point agreement Trump presented as a breakthrough. The White House said the plans for the technical talks had not been finalized, and that the logistics had never been simple or predictable. As of now, the vice president was not departing tonight, the spokesperson said, while adding that the administration still expected technical talks to begin as soon as possible.
Trump signed the deal on Wednesday at the Palace of Versailles and called it a step toward ending the Iran war and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. But he also acknowledged that it did not meet all of his original goals, including ending Iran’s ballistic missile program. He said it was “a little bit unfair for Iran not to have some” missiles if other countries had them, adding: “If Saudi Arabia and Qatar all have some, in relative proportion I think it’s OK.”
That gap is the heart of the deal. The agreement Trump announced is only interim, and the details of a final U.S.-Iran agreement still have to be negotiated during a 60-day negotiation between Washington and Tehran that was initially planned for Friday in the Swiss Alps. In plain terms, the sides have settled the opening framework, not the hard part: what rules, limits and commitments will govern the longer-term deal.
The political fight over that framework is already sharp. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump “didn’t get peace through strength, he got payoff through weakness,” adding that “Americans got almost nothing we wanted and needed, and Trump gave away the store.” He said: “The Iranians took him to the cleaners.” Iran has claimed the interim agreement as a victory, and the deal was framed in Tehran as a triumph for Iran’s negotiators, while critics and many independent experts said the terms heavily favor Tehran.
Trump and his allies had previously ripped up President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal because it did not address Iran’s missile arsenal, and that same issue has again been left outside the new agreement. Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said the deal showed how Iran did not allow America and Israel to achieve the objectives they had set at the beginning of the war. That leaves the White House with a political problem as well as a diplomatic one: it is trying to sell a deal as strong while moving into talks that still have to settle the questions the first round left behind.
The immediate question is not whether the talks exist, but whether the parties can keep them on track long enough to turn an interim ceasefire-style understanding into something lasting. Until the final U.S.-Iran terms are written, the White House is left defending a deal that both sides are already describing in opposite ways.
