"Show A Little Toughness" – Why JD Vance's Iran Trip Raised Eyebrows

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Pat** (0:26)
The negotiation is taking place, right? Vance is in Switzerland. The Iranian people show up, the delegates who want to negotiate with Vance. Bunch of videos are going viral. They're sitting there talking to each other. There's clips of saying, look, they're punking Vance. Cutter's leader didn't even want to shake the vice president's hands. You know, you can play some of these clips so they can see it. That is the broker who's trying to make this deal happen. And this is the moment they're kissing and looking at this. That's a Qatar leader walks off, and it looked like JD wanted to shake hands, but he went the other direction. Some are saying they spoke before. And look, JD keeps trying to, but he looked at him, so he gave him the right attention as well. And then there's the moment, if you have this, where the Pakistani leader in the middle, who is trying to negotiate the deal, but Iranian delegation comes in and says, he can't say something like that. And apparently they got up and they left the meeting. Okay, can you press play on this one, please?
This was the moment, and if you look at the leader's face, he's like, wait a minute, what just happened? That's the Pakistani leader on the right that's been trying to broker the deal.
And suddenly he's like, wait a minute, what took place? And allegedly, they decided to leave, and they left everybody there and look at Vance.
So again, 100% of what I'm saying to you right now is speculation. 100% of what I'm telling you right now is speculation. I'm not telling you based on facts that I know. But then they left, and allegedly both groups agreed to give each other 16 days to figure this part out. JD left, the other folks left, the next tier of players stayed. So imagine the C-suite executives left, but the VPs and directors are there to negotiate the deal together. They got 16 days. While this was going on, the president tweeted something about getting the deal done. And this tweet really upset a lot of Iranians, they said, we don't take the president's threat seriously. And the threat was something like, if you guys don't get the deal done, we're gonna bomb Iran in ways we have never bombed Iran before and ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.

**Tom** (2:26)
Again.

**Pat** (2:26)
Yeah, again. And yeah, Iran must immediately stop the highly paid proxies in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don't, we'll hit Iran hard again, just like we did last week, only harder. And so this is one, but there's another one as well. Another one is like, let's get this deal done. And Iran's people are like, we're not taking this negotiation seriously.
And so this is, this is LeDen. I'll pause here real quick, Tom, to come to you. And then we'll get into the real issue that I want us to process together. Go ahead, Tom, your thoughts on this.

**Tom** (2:50)
Well, the first thing I think that is good is what's happening in the background. And what's happening in the background today, right now, can you pull the Strait of Hormuz tracker?
Real quick. You guys have it. It should be on your list. It should be already up as a tab in there.
Okay, scroll down, Pat, watch this. Look at this, how many ship transponders are in the narrow part of the Strait of Hormuz right now? 55, a normal day before February 20th was 60 So the Iranians may be saying, well, the Straits are still closed, we're doing this and everything, but somehow 55 ships are coming through, so this is a good thing. So whatever is happening, I think there's two things happening, Pat. I think there's a little bit of theater in the front end, like a tweet from our president, walking into a room, walking out on these guys' behalf. But I think there's also posturing for the big discussions and the big issues. I don't think these are walkaways right now. I think people are posturing over the big issues. You've got ships moving through the strait, which is good news for all of us, frankly.