The US-Israel war on Iran could conclude in a week or a few months, Vice-president JD Vance said in an interview, hours before US forces launched retaliatory strikes against Iran, in response to the downing of the Apache helicopter near the strait of Hormuz a day earlier.
In a new interview with CBS, taped early Tuesday and set to air later this week, Vance claimed the US was “very close to achieving” a peace deal with Iran, adding that it could “absolutely” come before the midterm elections.
“Right now, I feel that we are in a position to get a deal that is good for the United States economically and that really does deal with the Iranian nuclear program,” Vance said, offering the latest vague assessment from the Trump administration on the future of its controversial war.
“Not just now, not just while Donald Trump is president, but for the long term, to where my kids can say when they’re adults: ‘Iran is not going to have a nuclear weapon,’” Vance continued. “That’s the goal of the policy. And I think we’re very close to achieving that goal. But we [have] still got some wood to chop. We’re going to keep doing it.”
Shortly after 5pm ET on Tuesday, the US Central Command (Centcom) announced that US forces had begun launching “self-defense strikes” on Iran in response to the downing of the Apache helicopter near the strait of Hormuz.
“The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression,” Centcom said in a social media post.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that the US “must, of necessity, respond to the attack” but also claimed that there was a “good chance” of signing a deal with Iran “in two or three days”.
Since the US and Israel launched a war against Iran in February, the conflict has triggered retaliatory strikes from Iran against the US’s Gulf allies, a blockade of the strait of Hormuz, soaring energy costs around the world and a fragile ceasefire.
Over the past three and a half months, the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that it is close to reaching a deal with Iran, which Trump has also accused of attempting to stall and “outwait” him until the US’s midterm elections.
Last month, Trump told his cabinet members in a meeting: “They thought they were going to outwait me, you know, ‘We’ll outwait him, he’s got the midterms’ … I don’t care about the midterms.”
In the CBS interview, Vance said he anticipated that “we’re going to know a lot before the midterm elections,” adding: “I think that the deal could happen in the next week, but the deal could also happen months from now.”
Iran has acknowledged over the last few weeks that although discussions with the US are continuing, no final agreement has been reached. The discussions have been further complicated by Israel’s recent strikes across Beirut, in turn triggering retaliatory strikes from Iran which regards Israel’s attacks as a violation of the already fragile ceasefire.
In a statement earlier this week, Iran’s parliamentary speaker and top negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf condemned the attacks, adding that US bases and assets across the region had become “legitimate targets” following the strikes.
“They are neither committed to a ceasefire nor believe in dialogue, and through the naval blockade and violation of agreements regarding Lebanon they showed that they only understand the language of power,” Ghalibaf said.
Meanwhile, US secretary of state Marco Rubio detailed Trump’s demands for a deal with Iran during his congressional testimony last week, including “severe and long-term limitations” on Iran’s nuclear program.
In a contentious interview with NBC this week, Trump signaled that the US would cooperate with Iran on destroying its uranium stockpile if the two countries reached a deal.
“If we make a deal that now we’re friendly, we’ll all go together. It’ll be our equipment. We’ll take it out and destroy it, whether it’s on site or whether we take it off site,” Trump said.
“Now, if we don’t make a deal, then we’re going to take them out militarily very harshly. And we’ll wait till we do that before we go, in which case we’ll have safety either way.”
