Foreign & Public Diplomacy

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at new stressors to planned U.S.-Iran peace talks, a rare meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwanese opposition leader Cheng Li-wun, and Djibouti’s all-but-predetermined presidential election.

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance departed for Islamabad on Friday to participate in Pakistan-mediated peace talks to end the Iran war. But a new warning from Tehran amid Israel’s continued strikes on Lebanon may upend negotiations before they can even begin.

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at new stressors to planned U.S.-Iran peace talks, a rare meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwanese opposition leader Cheng Li-wun, and Djibouti’s all-but-predetermined presidential election.

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance departed for Islamabad on Friday to participate in Pakistan-mediated peace talks to end the Iran war. But a new warning from Tehran amid Israel’s continued strikes on Lebanon may upend negotiations before they can even begin.

The U.S. delegation—led by Vance as well as special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—expressed cautious optimism ahead of Saturday’s dialogue. “We’re looking forward to the negotiation. I think it’s going to be positive,” Vance told reporters before boarding Air Force Two. At the same time, Vance warned that if the Iranians “try and play us, then they’re going find that the negotiating team is not that receptive.”

However, the likelihood of peace talks occurring is growing slimmer by the hour. On Friday, Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf wrote on X that “a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran’s blocked assets” must occur “prior to the commencement of negotiations.”

Ghalibaf did not specify what those blocked assets might be, but experts suspect that they are related to Iranian funds frozen by U.S. and other Western sanctions. Last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News that “we now know where the Iranian leadership bank accounts are and those are being frozen.” Tehran maintains that one of its conditions for a peace deal is the removal of these sanctions.

Trump downplayed Tehran’s demands on Friday. “The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways,” he wrote on Truth Social. “The only reason they are alive today is to........

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