Trump Abandons Push for Iran Deal and Reassigns Vance to Domestic Issues
The president said the United States no longer needs an agreement to end the war with Iran and told his vice-president to turn his attention to crime and corruption at home.
By Amit Ricci ·
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the United States is no longer pursuing an agreement to end the war with Iran, and ordered Vice-President JD Vance, who had led recent efforts to revive negotiations with Tehran, to concentrate on domestic politics instead.
In a post on his social media site, Trump said he was redirecting the vice-president to devote his "complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S".
Vance had reportedly been in contact with intermediaries in Iran and Qatar about restarting talks to end the conflict, which began in February when the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran. Tehran responded by closing access to the strait of Hormuz, a move that drove fuel costs sharply higher around the world.
On Thursday, however, Trump appeared to shut the door on diplomacy. "We don't need a deal with Iran," he wrote. "Those days have long since passed. We've got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we've got their Strait!"
The announcement in effect normalises a stalemate. The US has kept a blockade on Iranian ports while mostly reopening the strait of Hormuz to marine traffic, including crude oil shipments. Washington has not carried out major strikes against Iran for several months, and Iran has not fired barrages of ballistic missiles at US bases and allies in the region.
Trump had already downplayed the prospect of renewed strikes last week, saying the war was "effectively over". Speaking at a White House press conference shortly after meeting Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, he said Israel and Gulf allies were well protected from Iran and that escalation was unnecessary. "At this point, taking the military action doesn't seem to be a very necessary thing," he told reporters, adding that the US remained "locked and loaded, ready to go for any reason". He said Gulf state leaders had lobbied him not to resume the war.
The decision sidelines Vance from the central foreign policy challenge of his vice-presidency. He had publicly distanced himself from the war and in April led a US delegation to Islamabad to negotiate an end to it. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff have also taken part in the negotiations.
Axios reported last week that Vance was speaking "almost daily" with Sheikh Mohammed, Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir and other mediators, and that he had sent a letter several weeks ago to Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, seeking to resume direct talks.
Vance last week blamed the conflict for the heavy defeat Republicans suffered in the midterm elections. "The reason we lost is the war," he wrote in a lengthy post on X. "The president himself said so last night." Trump has since stood by his decision to launch the war, conceding that it pushed up fuel prices but repeating his frequent assertion that it was necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
