Vice President Vance discussed ongoing negotiations with Iran during an interview with Martha MacCallum on FNC’s “The Story.”

MARTHA MACCALLUM, FOX NEWS: I want to get to as much as we can with you, so I will jump right in, if I may. And I want to start with Iran, because we are watching this back and forth in Geneva, and it’s happening. We can put up on the screen the impressive military presence that we have in the whole area. Reminds people a lot of what we saw off the coast of Venezuela when there was this question about whether or not we were about to take military action. It looks very much like that. You have Iran today halting traffic in the street for a few hours. We heard the ayatollah say one of your nice warships might end up at the bottom of the sea. Where is this going? J.D. VANCE: I won’t make any announcements today. The president has lots of options. We have a powerful military. The president has shown a willingness to use it, and he also has a remarkable diplomatic team and shown a willingness to use that, too. What the president has been clear with the Iranians-and I just talked to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner this morning about some of the negotiations-the United States has certain redlines. Our primary interest here is we don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon. We don’t want nuclear proliferation. If Iran has nuclear weapons, there are other regimes that are friendly and some not friendly. It would be a disaster for the American people, because you have these crazy regimes all over the world with the most dangerous weapons in the world, and that’s one of the things the president has said he will prevent. Now, we would very much like, as the president has said, to resolve this through a conversation and a diplomatic negotiation. But the president has all options on the table. And one thing about the negotiation I will say this morning is: in some ways that went well. They agreed to meet afterwards. But in other ways it was very clear that the president has set some redlines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through. So we will keep on working at it. But of course the president reserves the ability to say when he thinks that diplomacy has reached its natural end. We hope we don’t get to that point, but if we do, that will be the president’s call. MARTHA: The president said on Friday that the best thing that could happen would be regime change in Iran. We know that that is what the crown prince in exile wants to see as well. Don’t do an Obama in this situation. Don’t make some kind of deal where we release $ 6 billion from Qatar and let them go along with the ballistic missile program. Don’t do that again. VANCE: The president will do what he thinks is in the best interest of the American people. He’s shown very clearly that he is not Barack Obama. He takes a much different approach to America’s national security, and he’s much more willing to act aggressively to defend America’s national security. But the president of the United States is very much trying to find a solution here, whether it’s through diplomatic options or through another option, that means that the Iranians cannot have a nuclear weapon. That has always been the main focus. And if you go back to the campaign that he ran in 2015-the Republican primary campaign that he won-he said, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It’s important for the American people to appreciate: it’s one of the most hostile and also one of the most irrational regimes in the world. You can’t have people like that have the most dangerous weapon known to man. It would be awful for our security, awful for the future of our children. That is the goal of the president of the United States, and he has lots of options and a lot of tools to make sure that doesn’t happen. MARTHA: They say we don’t have that, that we just have a peaceful program and there’s no way we are ending that. It’s hard to see-and you are not even mentioning the ballistic missiles or the support for the proxies. Are those also things that would be part of the package in any sort of deal, or are they not on the table? VANCE: Look, everything is on the table. We certainly want Iran to-as a state sponsor of terrorism, one of the largest states doing that-they endanger national security. But the most important way they could is if they acquired a nuclear weapon, and that is the redline the president of the United States has consistently said. Of course the Iranians say that they- we know it’s not true. They have shown a number of things that make it clear that they are interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon. Our goal is to make sure that…
RealClearPolitics Videos