Middle East crisis live: Trump claims Iran attack ‘on hold’ due to request from Gulf allies

Giving an update on Iran , JD Vance says the US has a “simple proposition” and there are “two paths to go down”.

“Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” he says, warning of the associated dangers and touting the US’s “degradation” of Iran’s military capabilities.

He says Iran having a nuclear weapon would lead to other nations “scrambling” to get their own, setting off a “nuclear arms race” that would “make us all much less safe”.

“Iran would really be the first domino in what would set off a nuclear arms race all over the world,” he says.

He says the US is “willing to cut a deal so long as the Iranians are willing to meet us on that core issue of never having a nuclear weapon”. (This is confusing because, as you will be aware, Trump has claimed several times in recent weeks that Iran had already agreed to this).

He says that the US is negotiating in “good faith” and he thinks a deal is possible.

Option B, Vance goes on, is to restart the military campaign “to continue to prosecute the case, to continue to try to achieve America’s objectives.”

“That’s not what the president wants and I don’t think that’s what the Iranians want either,” he says.

He says there’s an opportunity to reset the Washington-Tehran relationship, “but it takes two to tango”.

double quotation mark We are not going to have a deal that allows the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, so as the president just told me, we are locked and loaded. We don’t want to go down that pathway but the president is willing and able to if we have to.