WASHINGTON — Iran will allow United Nations nuclear inspectors into the country following two days of talks in Switzerland, Vice President JD Vance announced Monday — despite Iran putting out mixed messages.

“The Iranians have agreed to invite [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors back into their country,” Vance said at a press conference in Lucerne before returning to Washington. 

“That is a major milestone for the American people and the first step in permanently denuclearizing, or permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran.”

Vance admitted before boarding Air Force Two that “we’re going to see what they actually let the inspectors do once they’re in the country.”

US negotiators want the inspectors to identify the locations of Iran’s estimated 1,000 pounds of near-weapons-grade uranium as a first step toward retrieving and then down-blending it.

The Vance-led talks also produced a plan to use an unspecified amount of frozen Iranian funds to buy US agricultural products.

Hours later, the Treasury Department formally lifted sanctions on Iranian oil for 60 days — a financial windfall described in last week’s memorandum of understanding to end the nearly four-month war.

“As long as they respect us, we’re not going to have any trouble,” Trump said Monday afternoon in the Oval Office.

Trump said that the US negotiating team was doing a “fantastic job” — as the Lucerne talks continue with lower-level staff after Vance’s departure.

“If Iran doesn’t live up to their agreement, or if they’re not behaving, I will do what I have to do,” the president added.

Trump celebrated some of the developments on Truth Social, writing, “everybody is fully aware that Iran will agree to have Major Weapons Inspections in order to ensure ‘Nuclear Honesty’ long into the future.”

As soon as the progress was reported, however, Iranian leaders began undercutting the apparent progress — a recurring feature in months of peace talks culminating in the MOU.

The semi-official Tasnim News Agency reported: “The issue of granting permission for IAEA inspectors to enter Iran was not approved by the Iranian negotiating team or by responsible government officials.”

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told state-run IRNA that “Iran’s interactions with the agency, in line with its obligations under safeguard agreements, will continue according to the existing framework.”

The existing situation has not allowed IAEA inspectors to access three nuclear facilities bombed by the US in Operation Midnight Hammer.

Vance urged reporters to be skeptical of claims from Iranian propaganda organs.

“We laid a very good foundation for a successful final deal,” Vance insisted.

“The final deal is the house. We set the foundation, we haven’t built the house, but we’ve laid a successful foundation.”

Vance acknowledged that working with the Iranians can be “confusing.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with the Iranians over the last few months. Sometimes I find them extremely confusing as negotiators,” he said.

“I would just encourage the media [to] mistrust a little bit what you see coming out of Iranian social media. They can be confusing negotiators, but we feel like we’re making progress.”

The vice president also claimed Iran and the US had established “mechanisms” to resolve disputes over the Strait of Hormuz as well as the latest cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon — which appeared to be holding as of Monday morning.

Vance did not elaborate beyond saying the plan entailed “actually talking to each other and figuring out how to stop the shooting.” 

A joint statement by mediators from Pakistan and Qatar said a “de-confliction cell” involving the US, Iran, and Lebanon — but apparently not Israel or Hezbollah — would be created to “ensure the adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.”

Vance credited Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner with coming up with the idea of using frozen Iranian funds to buy US soybeans, corn and wheat, calling it “a classic Trump deal, where if Iranian assets are ever unfrozen, they’re going to go to make American farmers richer and to feed the Iranian people.

“That’s a very, very good and very classic Trump deal that’s great for our people, great for the people of Iran, and fundamentally, again, will contribute to this regional security architecture that we’ve built, and that we’re going to work very hard to ensure that it endures,” he added.

Iranian sources pushed back on the assertion, calling it “Western propaganda.”

“Iran is not planning to purchase US agricultural goods, and there were no discussions yesterday regarding IAEA inspectors coming to Iran,” Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian professor closely linked to the regime, posted to X.

Former President Joe Biden in 2023 released $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds to Qatar for the purchase of food and medicine, but the money wasn’t distributed due to Iran-backed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. It was not immediately clear if the food-buying plan was confined to those funds.

Iran is believed to have more than $100 billion in assets frozen by the US and its allies.

Vance did not mention concrete agreements on the nuclear issue — Trump’s primary goal for the talks — or on Iran’s ballistic missile program.

Vance’s comments Monday followed a series of blistering statements from Trump Sunday, including a threat to seize the Strait of Hormuz and “blow the s–t out of” Iran.

The VP confirmed Monday that the comments by the president had caused the Iranians to “threaten to walk out, or at least there were social media threats that they would walk out, but we were negotiating well past 1 in the morning yesterday, so they didn’t walk out, and their technical team is still here.”

Vance ultimately shrugged off the comments, telling reporters: “What we told the Iranians yesterday is, ‘When you guys engage in what us millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record.'”

Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff are leading continuing negotiations in Switzerland.

An interim deal to end more than three months of fighting between the US and Iran, signed by Trump last week, opens a 60-day window for negotiators to settle the future of Tehran’s nuclear program as well as billions in frozen Iranian assets, among other issues.