US Vice President JD Vance has revealed that the deconfliction channel Washington and Tehran agreed to set up during talks in Switzerland this past weekend includes representatives from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the US Army’s Central Command, who will sit together in Qatar.

“One of the things we wanted to come out with [was a] channel on the Iranian side [for reducing conflict], which we did,” Vance said in an interview with the UnHerd British news site, which took place while the vice president flew back from those talks in Switzerland on Monday, but wasn’t published  until Thursday.

“They were like, ‘OK, fine, we’ll send somebody from the IRGC to go hang out in Doha with somebody from CENTCOM,’ and that’s how we’re going to settle a lot of these disputes,” Vance said.

While US officials have recently revealed contact that has been established with the IRGC during negotiations with Iran since the outbreak of the war, the fact that Vance is now saying that the engagement is taking place at the military level was particularly noteworthy, given that the US has designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Before departing Switzerland on Monday, Vance gave a press conference during which he touted what he said were two new mechanisms that the US and Iran agreed to establish during their weekend negotiations — one to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz remains open and another to maintain a regional ceasefire, particularly in Lebanon.

It was unclear which of those two mechanisms Vance was describing in the UnHerd interview, or whether the IRGC-CENTCOM coordination hub that has purportedly been set up in Doha will deal with both of those issues.

It was specifically the deconfliction mechanism that Vance announced regarding Lebanon that infuriated Israel, which has argued that Iran should have no say on what happens in the country.

But either because of Iran’s significant leverage in the Strait of Hormuz or because Washington believes that Iran is needed to rein in Hezbollah, the US first agreed to Tehran’s demands that the memorandum of understanding inked last week include a ceasefire in Lebanon and then agreed to allow Iran to be part of the deconfliction mechanism that was established to ensure that ceasefire.

The US has sought to blunt criticism by announcing the reestablishment of a separate Lebanon deconfliction mechanism, in which Israeli and Lebanese military officials sit together with CENTCOM to respond in real time to potential threats to the ceasefire.

It’s unclear, though, whether this mechanism — outlined by Marco Rubio’s State Department — or the one laid out by Vance in Switzerland is actually active, as US President Donald Trump has oscillated between the two top aides to create a policy that sometimes appears contradictory.

The US established a direct channel between Israel and Lebanon in April, specifically to........

© The Times of Israel