00:00The president making the rounds over the course of the morning,
00:03indicating that Steve Whitcoff, Jared Kushner are going to be the point people go into these talks.
00:07Curious what you make of that, the latest there,
00:09and sort of what you think will be notably different at this meeting
00:12compared to the one that took place between J.D. Vance and his Iranian counterparts last week.
00:17Well, I have no idea what's going to be notably different.
00:19One of the things that seems to be a through line is everything seems to be notably the same.
00:23The only through line we have so far is that there's generally a ceasefire
00:27between the United States and Iran, between Israel and Lebanon.
00:31But otherwise, everyone keeps claiming that progress is being made,
00:34but what's really happening as a result?
00:37We've had a few things in Axios that we had reported.
00:40One, that there is an idea out there that the U.S. had started to advance
00:44of providing Iran access to its frozen assets, its currency,
00:50bank accounts essentially, of about $20 billion in return for them
00:54giving up uranium to the United States.
00:56Its highly enriched uranium stockpiles.
00:58The Iranians wanted more money, and then the president came out and said he wasn't going to do this.
01:02However, there remain the very big issues, which is Iran has highly enriched uranium.
01:09The United States has access to Iran's money and has basically frozen them out from it.
01:14That's a possible trade item.
01:16Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz.
01:19The United States wants it open and has a blockade.
01:21Those things seem tradable.
01:23And then more broadly, the United States has lots of weaponry and sanctions against Iran.
01:28Iran funds terrorist proxy groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
01:32And so that also seems to be a trade item.
01:35But so far, we have not seen anything in writing that clearly shows what's up for trade,
01:40what's up for discussion, what the progress is.
01:42So until then, you have statements from President Trump and what you just played there,
01:46Energy Secretary Chris Wright, saying all this progress is happening.
01:50And then you have the Iranians saying, no, no, it's not.
01:52We do know they're talking because obviously they're talking and also they're not shooting.
01:57I do need to ask you, as we were speaking, your Axios colleague,
02:01Barack Ravid, was now contradicting the president who said earlier that Vice President J.D. Vance would not be attending
02:07these talks.
02:08Axios is now reporting that Vice President J.D. Vance will lead the U.S. delegation for another round of
02:12talks in Islamabad.
02:13I know you've been on with us, but I didn't know if you'd heard that as well and what you
02:17think is on that.
02:17I didn't want to come out and say it because I wasn't sure if it had come out yet.
02:20It would be a shocking breach of protocol if J.D. Vance were not there.
02:24So when you just listed those two names and didn't list J.D. Vance, I was rather surprised.
02:28Yes, J.D. Vance is the lead negotiator.
02:30He's supposed to be.
02:31And he's going to be taking that role here as well.
02:34All right, Nancy, let's go to you.
02:35I want to talk to you about some of the mixed messaging we're getting, not just from the administration, but
02:40also on the Iranian side as well.
02:42We've had infighting between IRGC members and more political elites.
02:47We've had this very bellicose tweet this morning or social media post from the president threatening to once again take
02:54out Iran's bridges and power plants.
02:56But at the same time, going back to talks and saying things are progressing and they think that the U
03:01.S. can get a deal.
03:02What is going on here?
03:04So you make a very important point because over the end of the weekend, or at least on Friday, we
03:09saw talks about a ceasefire from the foreign minister for only the state news media to say that actually the
03:17Ayatollah was on board.
03:18And the reason that was significant, not just because it impacts the talks, but it was the first rule break
03:25we'd seen or fissures within the regime, something we've been looking for as a sign of potential fractures for the
03:34regime.
03:35And so that was noteworthy.
03:37But I think you get at a very important point is we're also seeing some broken patterns in the United
03:44States where the president facing challenges in terms of reaching a strategic outcome that is beneficial to the United States
03:53is turning back to tactical threats.
03:56We saw this earlier with the threat to kill a civilization and now, as you know, in this latest social
04:03media post, he's threatened to strike Iranian infrastructure in addition to being a violation to the Geneva Conventions.
04:10And doing so doesn't answer the ultimate question that the U.S. is trying to resolve, which is how to
04:16get the strategic outcome that they want.
04:18And so it feels to me that we're on a cycle in which we're trying to leverage the U.S.
04:25military superiority to reach an understanding of what we want to achieve through these war aims.
04:31And as your colleague noted, there are a lot of things that the United States and Iran are trying to
04:37achieve.
04:38The nuclear program, reopening the strait, sanctions relief, what would happen with proxies, the Iranian proxies on the war in
04:45Lebanon.
04:45The last time there were serious negotiations about this, it took nearly two years to reach an agreement on just
04:51one component of it.
04:52And so I know there's been a back and forth today about whether the vice president is attending and what
04:59that means.
04:59I'm also curious if there will be more technical experts in this next round of negotiations, because in the past,
05:06these negotiations were successful not when the top sort of headline-making attendees were there,
05:13but when the experts were able to work out these details such that when folks like the vice president or
05:18the president's top negotiator came to the table,
05:21it wasn't to iron out these very, very specific points, but to really sort of put the final signature on
05:27it.
05:27So I'm curious if we'll see a different tactic in terms of how the United States approaches these talks,
05:32not just through who's attending from the White House, but who's attending from government agencies that could really help get
05:39to a resolution.
05:40Mark, we've got about a minute left, but I do want to ask you about your reporting on what's happening
05:43with Cuba,
05:44because the president has maintained that that's still very much a live issue for him going forward here.
05:48I'm struck the last time I sat down with Cuba's ambassador to the UN, he was reluctant to tell me
05:53with whom the Cubans had been meeting.
05:54I wouldn't say if it was Secretary Rubio or others. We now know that there has been a meeting.
05:58Give us in this minute that we have left the latest that you know of the status of those conversations
06:02as the president's threats continue.
06:05Friday before last, eight days ago, a high-level State Department delegation went down to Havana,
06:10touched down in Havana, first time the United States government plan had done that since 2016 when President Obama went.
06:15They had meetings with the Cuban officials, Cuban apparatchiks, as well as the grandson of Raul Castro, known as Raulito,
06:23also nicknamed El Congrejo the Crab.
06:25And they basically delivered the United States' longstanding message that you need to have economic and democratic reforms,
06:33free political prisoners, and start discussing returning seized assets that were taken during the revolution to U.S. persons and
06:40corporate interests.
06:41In return, the United States didn't offer much. They offered to help set up Starlink to increase Internet access.
06:48They also made very clear, the United States did to the Cubans, that if there's a huge problem and a
06:53humanitarian crisis or societal collapse in Cuba,
06:57the United States is not going to stand idly by. That's not a direct threat, but boy, it's an indirect
07:01one.
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