Just hours before Iran claimed it hit the United States military’s early warning radar system in Bahrain early on Friday, US President Donald Trump said he had told his country’s lead negotiator, Vice President JD Vance, that, “We don’t need a deal with Iran.”
Instead, Trump said, he has told Vance to focus on unearthing what the president says is corruption and crime in Democratic-controlled cities and states – after Democrats stunningly took over Congress in the midterm elections.
Vance is a known critic of the US-Israeli war on Iran. He has blamed Trump’s military strikes on Iran and the subsequent energy crisis and inflation in the US for the Republicans’ losses in Congress.
Meanwhile, several commercial vessels trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz have hit naval mines, or were struck by the Iranian military, over the past week – but Trump continues to claim that Washington controls the critical waterway nonetheless.
So, where is the war headed – and is Vance being sidelined by Trump?
Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he had asked Vice President Vance “to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S.”
“We don’t need a deal with Iran,” he added. “Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”
The Trump administration has appeared increasingly divided on the foregoing arc of war on Iran since the midterm losses.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Washington’s economic pressure campaign against Iran is proving effective, so a resumption of large-scale military operations is unnecessary.
“The economic pressure on Iran is going to get even worse,” he added.
Trump has given mixed messages about his plans for the war. Despite threatening that he might “destroy” Iran last week, this week Trump has said that further strikes against Iran are “quite unlikely”.
Vance favours a deal with Iran, which Trump believes is not possible currently.
Vance led the US negotiations in April in Islamabad, where he helped secure the June memorandum of understanding with Iran. That quickly collapsed over glaring gaps in each side’s understanding of what had been agreed, however – particularly in reference to control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The US vice president also led direct talks with Iran in Switzerland and is part of renewed diplomatic efforts, engaging Qatari and Pakistani mediators and seeking continued negotiations with Iranian officials.
On November 4, following sweeping Republican losses in the midterm elections, Vance publicly questioned whether the war had been worth the political and economic costs. In a post on X, he wrote: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” endorsing diplomatic resolution as sound advice.
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.”
Political analysts say Vance’s rather blunt assessment is also an effort to distance himself from Trump’s war on Iran, when the president is facing his all-time low career approval ratings.
On June 17, speaking at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France – when both parties had just signed the Islamabad MoU – Trump told reporters: “This way, 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.”
The next day, Vance told reporters he believed the president was “joking”.
On Friday morning, Tehran said it had attacked and destroyed an early-warning radar system belonging to the US military in Bahrain, in what it said was retaliation for an air attack on a telecommunications tower in southern Iran’s port city of Sirik.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, Trump said Washington’s allies in the Middle East had asked him to hold off on renewed large-scale attacks against Iran. He added that the US could destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure, bridges and manufacturing facilities within three days, if it wanted to.
“Saudi Arabia has asked me to please just let it be the way it is now for a while,” he said at White House, adding that Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain preferred the current approach.
Asked whether he would have launched further attacks without those requests, Trump replied: “Yes, I would.”
Though Trump acknowledged that rising fuel prices caused by the war contributed to the Republicans’ defeat in the midterm elections, he defended his decision to attack Iran.
Meanwhile, Brigadier General Ali Reza Belaili, an adviser to the aerospace force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said an order by Iran’s supreme leader to strike “enemies” without geographical limits will be implemented “at the appropriate time”.
Iran’s Mehr news agency quoted him saying that “the more Americans persist, the more they will sink into this swamp they created themselves”.
This week, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and top negotiator, told Al Jazeera that the Strait of Hormuz will “never return” to its status before the US-Israel war on Iran. That was when all commercial shipping was able to pass through the strait freely without having to pay tolls.
Iran in effect closed the strait, through which one-fifth of global oil supplies were shipped in peacetime, in early March following the start of US-Israeli strikes. That sent global energy markets into turmoil.
Ghalibaf said Tehran has sent a clear proposal for a ceasefire and for the reopening of the strait to Washington via Qatari mediators, laying out seven conditions, and added that Iran is now waiting for an official response from the US.
“The ball is now in the American court,” he said.
Iran’s conditions include an end to the US naval blockade of Iran’s ports, the lifting of economic sanctions, the release of Iranian frozen funds, ending fighting on all fronts, and an explicit announcement of an end to the war.
The US has previously refused to agree to these demands without an agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme in place first. Iran wants to negotiate that separately.
Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the Chatham House think tank, told Al Jazeera: “We are still in a situation which is ‘no war, no peace’, and it’s unlikely to move for the time being.
“Major strikes are unlikely to happen in the imminent days, but things are likely to shift one way or the other in the next couple of weeks,” she said. “The Gulf countries are not necessarily endorsing this as a new normal, even if they prefer this to the prospect of a renewed war.”
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Ghalibaf said this week that “there are no ‘free waters’ [international waters] there, and the 1982 [UN Convention on the Law of the Sea] does not apply” to the Strait of Hormuz. The strait does, in fact, run solely through the territorial waters of Iran and Oman.
“The regulations within the Strait of Hormuz are governed by the laws of the two littoral states that border it,” he added, reiterating Iran’s position that it is tightly controlling the waterway.
Tehran has said that multiple “offending” vessels – which it says have used an “illegal” route, referring to the southern corridor of the strait – have caught fire during attempts to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has previously told approved ships to use a northern route which passes closer to its own coastline.
At least 12 tankers have been hit in the past 12 days, according to Iran.
The US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) says it has been “working round the clock” to keep the strait open.
On Wednesday, CENTCOM claimed that at least 4,000 ships had crossed the waterway with the US military’s assistance, carrying more than 1.7 billion barrels of crude oil.
However, all maritime agencies continue to advise against travelling through the strait, and insurers have raised prices sharply for such journeys, or are refusing cover at all.
