Trump cancels Iran deal pursuit and pulls Vance off war diplomacy

Donald Trump declared on Thursday that the United States no longer needs a deal to end its war with Iran, and ordered Vice President JD Vance — who had spent months quietly trying to restart negotiations — to turn his attention to domestic politics instead. "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!" Trump wrote on his social media site.

Vance had been the administration's most persistent negotiator. According to Axios, he was speaking "almost daily" with Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Pakistan's army head Asim Munir, and other intermediaries. He led a delegation to Islamabad in April, and weeks ago sent a letter to Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, proposing direct talks. Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff were also involved. All of that effort has now been cancelled by a single post.

The war began in February with joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran; Tehran answered by closing the Strait of Hormuz, and global fuel prices spiked. The strait has since been mostly reopened and Iran's ports remain under blockade, but the US has not carried out major strikes in months, and Iran has not launched missile barrages at US bases. Trump calls the war "effectively over" while insisting the military remains "locked and loaded."

The timing of the pivot is political. Vance publicly blamed the conflict for the historic Republican rout in the midterm elections, writing on X: "The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night." Trump has since doubled down on having launched it, admitting it drove up fuel prices while repeating that it was necessary to stop an Iranian nuclear weapon. Gulf leaders, who lobbied Trump against resuming hostilities, got their assurances at a briefing shortly after he met the Qatari prime minister.

So the negotiator-in-chief's deputy is reassigned — not to ending a war that shaped global energy prices, but to building a midterm-fraud narrative about "Democrat run Cities and States." At Arlington on Veterans Day, Trump and Vance stood together in the ceremonial unity of an administration whose defining war now proceeds without a negotiator, a strategy, or a vote.