President Trump threatened Sunday to resume bombing Iran unless Tehran reins in Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, even as Vice President J.D. Vance arrived in Switzerland to lead high-stakes nuclear negotiations with Iranian officials.
“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid proxies in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “If they don’t, we will hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!”
Vance, accompanied by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, met Sunday with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Pakistani army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir before entering negotiations with a high-level Iranian delegation led by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Pakistan and Qatar served as mediators.
The talks, held at a Swiss mountainside resort near Lake Lucerne, aim to flesh out the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, a 14-point framework signed last week by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to end hostilities between the two nations. The talks were initially scheduled for Friday but were delayed amid renewed Hezbollah-Israel fighting in Lebanon.
Vance said negotiators had made “great progress” in early sessions and described the U.S. posture as seeking to “fundamentally transform” the relationship with Iran if Tehran abandons its nuclear program and stops destabilizing the region.
A ceasefire in Lebanon has emerged as a central sticking point. The memorandum calls for the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon,” but fighting has continued since its signing, pushing the death toll from Israel’s offensive that began March 2 past 4,000. Iran briefly closed the Strait of Hormuz over Israeli strikes in Lebanon, though Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Sunday that oil flows through the waterway — through which 20% of global oil passes — were returning to normal. The national average gasoline price stood at $3.93 per gallon Sunday, down from $4.07 a week earlier but still about 70 cents above year-ago levels.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, offered a stark fallback scenario Sunday, predicting the diplomacy would fail and warning that Trump would then seize control of the Strait of Hormuz by force. “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them,” Graham said on CBS News.
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