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US vice-president JD Vance returned to Washington on Sunday with little to show for his efforts to deliver on some of Donald Trump’s most high stakes and unusual foreign policy gambits.
Vance emerged from 21 hours of talks with Iranian officials to announce that there was no agreement to end the US-Israeli war against Tehran.
His trip to Hungary days earlier to drum up support for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán proved fruitless too. The longtime populist leader and Trump ally was resoundingly defeated in parliamentary elections.
The twin failures were major setbacks for the vice-president, widely seen as Trump’s heir apparent, who was dispatched around the globe in recent days on missions where the odds were stacked against him.
Meanwhile, Vance, a convert to Catholicism, watched his boss over the weekend dig deeper into a spat with Pope Leo and attend a UFC fight with Marco Rubio, secretary of state and a rival to take the Maga mantle.
“We certainly knew there was a very good chance that Viktor would lose that election,” Vance said in an appearance on Fox News on Monday.
“We did it because he’s one of the few European leaders we’ve seen who has been willing to stand up to the bureaucracy in Brussels that has been very bad for the US,” he said.
The vice-president also defended his team’s efforts in Islamabad, citing “some progress” over the weekend. “[Iran] 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,” he told Fox News.
Foreign policy experts and former US officials said that it was unrealistic to expect the vice-president to come away with a fully fledged deal from a first round of talks with the Iranians.
“No reasonable person would have expected an agreement between the US and Iran in one day of talks,” said Phil Gordon, who served as national security adviser to vice-president Kamala Harris. “To send the vice-president into that also seemed to set him up for perceived failure,” he added.
A US official said that negotiators went to Islamabad expecting the meetings to be a brief encounter to set the table for future talks. The length of the talks and the seniority of the US and Iranian delegations, however, have been seen as a reflection of the serious commitment by both parties to the negotiations.
Vance’s role as head of the US delegation, which included special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, put him in an awkward position having long railed against US military intervention overseas.
Vance, a veteran of the Iraq war, is widely reported to have been cool on Trump’s plans to go to war with Israel against Iran. Now, he has become the face of the effort to end it.
“Iran may indeed be a poisoned chalice for Vance,” said Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine. “But if he actually solves it, that will go a long way to him becoming president,” he said.
The vice-president’s political stock has fallen as Trump himself contends with sliding approval ratings. The latest RealClearPolitics average shows just under 41 per cent of Americans have a favourable view of the vice-president, compared to nearly 50 per cent who have an unfavourable view.
“He has been completely shackled by the president’s agenda,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Stimson Center think-tank.
In Budapest, even as opinion polls showed that Orbán faced a resounding defeat in elections on Sunday, Vance appeared to be much more in his element.
“Vance would much rather be talking about Europe than Iran,” said Mills. “He flew to Hungary because he wanted to, he flew to Pakistan because he needed to.”
In a series of public appearances he railed against the EU and hailed the conservative world view shared by Trump’s and Orbán’s administrations.
Vance asked at a packed sports stadium in Budapest on Tuesday evening: “Will you stand against the bureaucrats in Brussels? Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy? Will you stand for western civilisation?”
He added: “Then my friends, go to the polls on the weekend and stand with Viktor Orbán,” and received a standing ovation.
Five days later, Orbán’s rival Péter Magyar swept parliamentary elections, with his Tisza party winning a supermajority of 138 out of 199 seats.