U.S. Vice President JD Vance sounded a warning on competing factions within Iran, with some open to good faith negotiation with the U.S. in the coming weeks and other spoilers, in comments to a Hungarian university. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium received apologies from the U.S. Vice President for his late arrival on Wednesday morning, given he had been up “very late last night” negotiating a temporary truce between the United States, Iran, and Israel. Even before that ceasefire got off to a bumpy start as Wednesday wore on, with apparent confusion over what the agreement actually contained, Vance warned his audience that the “fragile truce” was under threat from spoiler elements inside Iranian society who don’t want peace to succeed. Hailing the achievements of the U.S. military in the conflict to date, Vance reflected he had “learnt a lot about the Iranian system, and a lot about the way the Iranians negotiate” over the course of talks so far and explained that there were several competing factions within Iranian society, and that while the U.S. had been speaking to what seemed to be the most powerful — the Iranian foreign minister — others were dead-set against peace with America. He said:
…just in the response we’ve seen in the various segments of Iran, you have on one hand people who have responded very favourably, the Foreign Minister who said ‘we agree to the United States terms, we’ll do a ceasefire, we’ll do a negotiation, we’ll open the Strait of Hormuz, we’ll see if we can come to more agreement down the road’.
Some of the people have responded favourably and have said the right things, and then you have some people on social media within their system who are basically lying about what we have accomplished militarily, they are lying about the nature of the agreement, they are lying about the nature of the ceasefire.
