Welcome to Monday’s Washington Secrets, which comes a day after JD Vance flew home from talks with Iran. The view from Virginia’s Iranian community is gloomy. The excitement generated by the prospect of regime change has evaporated and been replaced by fear that a deal will be done to leave the country’s leaders in place. Plus, we look at Vance’s six red lines, and tell you which prominent Republican got a Creed shout-out…
A photograph of the late shah of Iran in full military regalia greets visitors to Amoo’s Restaurant in McLean, Virginia.
It is a clue to the loyalties of owner Michael Oveysi and his customers. They rejoiced when President Donald Trump went to war with the Islamic clerics who have maintained an iron grip on the country for 47 years and partied when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, was killed.
“Oh, my God, you should have seen … The restaurant was full, and Iranians were ordering large portions of food for parties at home,” Oveysi tells Secrets over a glass of sweet tea during a lull in service. They were tipping a lot to the girls.”
“It was good. We had two, three weeks of amazing business with Iranians and everybody else.”
But then the ceasefire came last week. Vice President JD Vance flew to Pakistan for talks with Iranian officials, and the mood shifted.
“Things really slowed down. Most Iranians are right now under depression,” Oveysi says. “They’re afraid there’ll be a deal letting the regime stay in power and forgetting about the people.”
As Trump and his officials worry about the Strait of Hormuz, gas prices, and a potential quagmire, the war is deeply personal here. Oveysi’s father was a pilot in Iran’s air force before the 1979 revolution and was later imprisoned by the hardline regime because of his relationship to the shah.
While Los Angeles may be nicknamed “Tehrangeles” for its huge American-Iranian population, as many as 30,000 members of the diaspora live in Virginia. McLean has a cluster of restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores selling boxes of dates, rose water, and flatbread.
Secrets decided to forgo the foreign policy blob in Washington with its endless Zoom discussions on the future of Iran and the political consultants who are suddenly all experts on the governing structure of Iran, and instead drove to the other side of the Potomac River to meet people with a real, lived understanding.
People like Ali Parsa, for example. The 27-year-old described spending seven days on horseback as his family fled when authorities discovered his father was a member of the Baha’i faith, a persecuted minority that cannot hold government jobs and is routinely imprisoned.
Parsa tells his story as he went about the sad business of shuttering one-half of his bakery. It was strewn with unused furniture and packing boxes.
The cost of importing products from Iran has doubled during the war. To compensate, he is halving his shop space and reducing his outgoings.
Yet his body shakes as he describes his relief at the killing of Khamenei, followed by the frustration at a status quo that has yet to bring freedom to people like his cousins, wounded during popular protests.
“Now it’s gotten to a point where it’s like we’re all at a standstill,” he says. “We’re all in traffic trying to see what’s going on, right?”
“It’s hard to put in words. You get emotional talking about it.”
The bakery, he says, is his family’s part of the American dream.
Parsa offers Secrets a slice of rollet, a traditional Iranian dessert that resembles a rose water-infused Swiss roll.
His shelves are filled with jars of Iranian pickles and stuffed peppers. His freezers hold saffron ice cream made by him and his father. Their bread fills the table at Divan restaurant around the corner.
Like Amoo’s, its tables were quiet on Saturday lunchtime.
“It’s affecting everyone,” said a waiter. “Nobody wants to go out.”
Hours later, Vance left Islamabad declaring that he had delivered his red lines to Iran’s negotiators, who had failed to understand they were playing a weak hand. What comes next is anyone’s guess.
But Oveysi says the Iranians had shown their hand by sending Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf to meet Vance. He was not the backing-down type.
“This guy used to be one of the Basij commanders,” he says, referring to a notorious volunteer militia. “He killed so many students during the 1999 protests.”
“This is the same guy. I mean, you can’t go sit down with terrorists and anticipate you’re going to get a good deal out of it.”
For Oveysi, it would be enough to get a deal that removed all of Iran’s uranium and put a nuclear weapon out of reach. But for Parsa, the only victory is regime change.
“This is the chance to do it. But if they don’t, then what was the point?” Parsa asks. “It’s just a massacre that happened.”
How Vance’s ‘table-setting’ trip became an endurance test
Vance flew out of Islamabad on Sunday after 21 hours of talks with Iranian negotiators.
A senior U.S. official told Secrets that the meeting was far from the failure depicted by other media outlets.
In fact, the source said, Vance had time to develop a relationship with the Iranians, and the talks may have started with misunderstandings and misconceptions but developed into “friendly and productive” discussions.
A second source familar with the meetings said negotiators expected this to a brief “table-setting meeting” to tee up future talks.
“Instead it turned into continuous 21-plus hour negotiations,” they said.
He left his counterparts under no illusion that they could not keep their nuke dream alive and spelled out to them that their position was much weaker than they realized. He left them to stew over his six red lines.
- An end to all uranium enrichment
- The dismantling of all major nuclear enrichment facilities
- The retrieval of highly enriched material
- Halting funding for terrorist proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis
- Reopening the Strait of Hormuz without tolls
- Signing up to a broader peace and security framework that includes regional allies
Secrets‘ view is that no one can seriously have expected a deal to be done in a day, particularly when the Iranian side will have to take any proposals back to Iran for sign off. It took 18 months to get the original nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, done in 2015, for example.
Vance was never going to stay for the rest of the two-week ceasefire, shuttling back and forth between the Serena Hotel and the US embassy, as talks played out.
But if this was only ever a table-setting exercise, the question remains: What comes next beyond Trump’s naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz?
Scalise gets taken ‘Higher’ at New Orleans gig, or something…
Creed was one of the big rock bands of the post-Grunge movement, hitting the big time in the 2000s. So its current tour is attracting its fair share of Gen X fans.
Including, it turns out, members of Congress. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) who was spotted by a Secrets source at Hondo Rodeo Fest gig in Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
He even got name-checked from the stage for “doing great things for us on Capitol Hill.”
Quote of the day… so far
The pope-president spat between Trump and Pope Leo XIV is becoming a feud for the ages.
After one side claimed a “delusion of omnipotence” was fueling the war in Iran, the other hit back with an AI image of himself as Jesus healing the sick.
Perhaps the best quote is a summary of where things are now from Massimo Faggioli, an expert on the papacy.
Faggioli told Reuters: “Not even Hitler or Mussolini attacked the pope so directly and publicly.”
READ MORE: POPE LEO DISMISSES TRUMP’S IRAN WAR DIGS
Lunchtime Reading
Orbán’s defeat shows what Trump’s opponents keep doing wrong: Insurgents from Paris and Rome to Buenos Aires and Seoul have a lesson for Democrats, writes Alex Burns. Order and nonconfrontation are out, along with hewing to traditional norms. Instead, to win you have to throw out the old party leaders and remake it in a new image.
Who is Peter Magyar, the candidate who ousted Hungary’s Orban? His journey from an Orban loyalist to his nemesis.