Fresh from a visit to Hungary to offer support to Prime Minister Viktor Orban in that country’s looming election — which Orban subsequently lost — Mr Vance then flew to Islamabad for talks intended to end the Gulf war . . . which promptly collapsed.
This was not overly surprising. The US, somewhat mystifyingly, agreed to the Iranian peace proposals being the starting point basis for negotiations — a strange thing to do if you wanted to end a war you were supposedly winning.
It was, therefore, not a shocking development that the US found the proposals unpalatable and walked away.
Whether the United States entered negotiations with every intention of settling a war which has caused wholesale global economic disruption is a moot point.
The same goes for Iran, for that matter.
They have personalised this geopolitical struggle to such a degree that any exercise of moderation or common sense will be perceived — by themselves, if by no one else — as individual weakness rather than practical global politics.
As a result, sharemarkets dropped and the price of a barrel of crude oil surged past $US100 a barrel — a point where New Zealand’s Reserve Bank will likely have to act to curb the inflationary pressures soaring energy prices are having on our economy.
The sole piece of good news is that the shooting has not resumed — yet. Unless you are in Lebanon, where Israel has determined that the ceasefire in the Gulf region seems not to have extended to.
Hopefully the delicate truce remains in place long enough for the warring parties to return to the table and move beyond their respective entrenched positions to a compromise point where each can claim victory and the world can move on.
Any such talks must centre on Iran’s nuclear programme. That was the ostensible reason for this war, and without a manifest result this crisis will come back to haunt the world again.
In the meantime the Strait of Hormuz — which a month ago oil tankers and gas lighters could cruise through at their leisure — remains blocked to shipping and subject to a threatened multi-million toll for its use.
That state of affairs does not sound like the swift, decisive ‘‘victory’’ which the United States president bullishly predicted after the first salvo of bombs were dropped.
The US economy is somewhat sheltered from the impact of this conflict by the country’s fuel reserves and its own oil fields, but its trading partners, generally, do not have that advantage. They will soon be unable to afford to buy US exports in their usual volume, bringing the impact of this war closer to home.
Americans have a devotion to their armed forces which will initially sustain the positions of the political leaders who placed them in harm’s way.
But if the US economy shrinks and the war becomes the prolonged struggle that Mr Trump pledged it would not, electoral fall-out will be inevitable.
Latest polling has the president’s net approval rating moving from positive to negative, and the mid-term elections are not far away.
Mr Trump only has to look across the globe to the fate of the politically-aligned Mr Orban — whose seemingly impregnable 16-year dominance of Hungarian politics ended at the weekend — to see how fickle the electoral winds can be.
Too many local factors were in play in that election for it to be regarded as the beginning of a global repudiation of Trump-style politics, but it is a salient reminder that elections are about ‘‘what have you done for me lately?’’
New Zealand has a looming election too, and the government can — quite rightly — argue that this mess is not of its making.
However, if the Official Cash Rate does indeed get hiked three times this year — as New Zealand’s biggest bank, ANZ, predicted yesterday — many voters will not be listening to that entirely reasonable point. And if fuel prices go past $5 a litre voters will be even less impressed.
Should that come to pass, the coalition’s leaders will be fervently hoping that JD Vance is not planning a visit down under.
