On Thursday, 12 November, in the ninth month of the war, the President of the United States took his negotiator out of the negotiation. He did it the way he does most things now, with a post on Truth Social.
“We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed! We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”
Vice President JD Vance, Donald Trump wrote, should now give “his complete and total attention” to the “Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States.” As CNN reported, the order arrived just as talks between Washington and Tehran had picked up speed, with both sides quietly working on a sensitive agreement that might head off a return to all-out war. Markets had been behaving as if the war was nearly over. After the post, oil prices surged and stocks fell.
The man who said it aloud
Democrats had just taken Congress in the midterms. On 4 November Vance wrote on X: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.” Then he added: “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.” Analysts quoted by Al Jazeera read this as a vice president putting distance between himself and a war waged by a president at the lowest approval ratings of his career. CNN put it more plainly: the reassignment suits Vance, who has achieved little at the table and may be weighing a 2028 run.
Trump said he agreed that the war had cost his party. His complaint was that Vance left out one line: “If you had it to do again, would you do it again? The answer is yes.”
Courts have always had a place for the courtier who says the true thing too early: somewhere far from the throne. That much is reflection. The record is simpler. Vance led the April talks in Islamabad that produced a memorandum of understanding in June. It fell apart over two incompatible readings of what had been agreed, above all on who controls the Strait of Hormuz. He went on to talk with the Iranians directly in Switzerland, and he worked with Qatari and Pakistani mediators, as late as October carrying letters to Tehran. On 17 June, at the G7 in Evian-les-Bains, Trump had told reporters: “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD. You better be careful, JD.” Vance said the next day that he thought the president was “joking”.
Three days, or a while
Last week Trump threatened that he might “destroy” Iran. On Sunday he told 60 Minutes he was “not looking” to escalate. On Monday: “At this point, it won’t be necessary, taking the military action.” Also on Monday: “Iran, militarily, is effectively over.” On Thursday he said the US could wreck Iran’s energy infrastructure, bridges and factories within three days if it chose to, but that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Bahrain had asked him to hold off. “Saudi Arabia has asked me to please just let it be the way it is now for a while,” he said. Would he have attacked without those requests? “Yes, I would.”
That evening, talking to the radio host Hugh Hewitt, he said: “it’s possible I would do it right now.” He said he would “absolutely” count it “a defeat” to leave office with the “Iran crazies” still in power.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has settled on hunger as the strategy. Writing for Newsweek, Shane Croucher reports that Rubio told G7 counterparts on Tuesday that Trump had weighed going back to war against making a deal, and picked a third course: keep squeezing the regime economically. “Eventually, economic realities penetrate the skull of the most radical lunatic,” Rubio said. He asked the allies to help guard shipping. None of them committed.
A radar in Bahrain
Hours after the post, early on Friday, the Revolutionary Guard said it had destroyed a US military early-warning radar in Bahrain. It called the strike retaliation for an air attack on a telecommunications tower in Sirik, a port on Iran’s southern coast. Central Command said two Iranian one-way attack drones were shot down, with no damage to the facility. The Guard warned that its aerospace force stood ready to respond “without geographical limits”. Brigadier General Ali Reza Belaili, an adviser to that force, told the Mehr news agency that “the more Americans persist, the more they will sink into this swamp they created themselves.”
Whose water
In peacetime a fifth of the world’s oil went through Hormuz. Iran in effect shut it in early March. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker and Tehran’s chief negotiator, told Al Jazeera this week that the strait will “never return” to its pre-war status, that “there are no ‘free waters’ there”, and that the 1982 UN law of the sea convention does not apply. The channel does in fact run entirely through Iranian and Omani territorial waters.
Ghalibaf says Qatar has passed Washington a ceasefire proposal with seven conditions, among them an end to the naval blockade, lifted sanctions, released frozen funds and a declared end to the war. “The ball is now in the American court,” he said. Washington has refused such terms until there is a nuclear agreement. Tehran wants that negotiated separately.
On the water, the two governments describe two different straits. Iran says at least 12 tankers have been hit in 12 days, “offending” vessels that took the southern corridor it calls “illegal” instead of its approved northern route. Central Command says at least 4,000 ships have crossed with US help, carrying more than 1.7 billion barrels of crude. Maritime monitors counted at least 37 attacks on ships in and near the strait in October, the worst month of the war. Every maritime agency still advises against the passage. Insurers have raised prices sharply, or refuse cover altogether.
What is held
Trump’s two possessions both come with caveats. Iranian officials say at least $100 billion of their assets is frozen abroad, and other estimates are far lower. Nor is the strait quiet. Behind it sits the nuclear question that started the war: the UN nuclear chief, Rafael Grossi, has seen no rebuilding at the bombed sites but cannot account for an estimated 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 60 percent. On Thursday Iran’s Assembly of Experts said reviewing withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty had become an “unavoidable necessity.”
“We are still in a situation which is ‘no war, no peace’,” Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi of Chatham House told Al Jazeera. “The Gulf countries are not necessarily endorsing this as a new normal, even if they prefer this to the prospect of a renewed war.”