Trump rules out striking Iran immediately after the midterms, saying a deal remains possible, as Vance reports progress in talks
Asked after his closing midterm speech at the Lincoln Memorial whether he was considering striking Iran after the elections, Donald Trump answered “No”, while Vice President JD Vance said Washington felt “pretty good” about the prospects of a negotiated settlement.
United States President Donald Trump has ruled out striking Iran immediately after Tuesday’s midterm elections, giving a blunt one-word answer — “No” — when reporters asked him after his closing campaign speech at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington whether he was considering renewed attacks once voters had cast their ballots.
The remark, reported by Reuters and the New York Post, marked a clear shift in tone from recent weeks, when Trump had repeatedly hinted that military action against Iran could resume after the 3 November elections. In a phone interview with Axios earlier on Monday he had said only that “one way or the other, we will do something, but there is no rush”, and he has previously warned Tehran that the war would end “very soon one way or the other” — either with a deal or with what he called “the hammer” coming down.
Speaking after a nearly hour-long address billed as his final appeal to midterm voters, Trump said on Monday that he believed Iran wanted to make a deal and that such an agreement could still happen. He repeated his central demand, however, stressing that Washington would never allow Tehran to possess a nuclear weapon — a condition he said Iranian leaders understood and had acknowledged even recently.
Vice President JD Vance reinforced the diplomatic signal, telling reporters that there had been “a number of good conversations with the Iranians” and that progress had been made. “Look, the president and I both feel pretty good about the prospects for potentially coming to a negotiated settlement. We’re going to keep on working at it,” Vance said, adding that no deadline had been set for Tehran to reach a deal and describing Iranian leaders as “a little unpredictable”.
The comments came against a backdrop of intensive indirect diplomacy. Iranian negotiators spent a third consecutive day in Doha on Sunday in talks conducted through Qatari mediators, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has described the discussions as “very intensive”, saying Qatar and Pakistan are both playing active roles in the effort to end a war now in its eighth month.
That war began in February, when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, and it has since centred on control of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a large share of the world’s seaborne oil once flowed. In his speech on Monday, Trump declared that the United States had won the war and controlled the strait, telling the crowd: “We wiped out their military and their air force, and we did everything we had to do.”
Markets responded to the softer rhetoric on Monday, with Brent crude falling by around 6 to 8 per cent as traders priced in the possibility of de-escalation, a move that also helped lift parts of the American stock market ahead of the elections. The oil price drop was the latest sign of how closely the conflict has been tied to voters’ concerns about fuel costs, which Trump himself has acknowledged are weighing on households.
Caution remains warranted, however. Reuters reported that Iranian sources still believed a new American attack was more likely than a deal, and Gulf governments have in recent days been braced for the possibility of a short, intense campaign after the midterms if talks collapse. The same day as Trump’s remarks, Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported several unexplained explosions on Qeshm Island near the Strait of Hormuz; no official explanation has been given for those blasts, and no confirmed connection to American military activity has been established.
What happens next now hinges on two clocks running in parallel. The first is electoral: on Tuesday, Americans will vote for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats and governors in 36 states, in contests that will decide how much freedom Trump has to pursue his agenda for the remainder of his term. The second is diplomatic: whether the Qatari-mediated draft under discussion in Doha can bridge the gap between Washington’s demand for a guarantee against an Iranian nuclear weapon and Tehran’s insistence that any deal on reopening the Strait of Hormuz must begin with an end to the American naval blockade.
If the talks produce a breakthrough, the immediate prize would be a calmer Gulf — safer shipping, steadier oil prices and relief for regional airlines and exporters that have endured months of disruption. If they stall, the strike options American commanders are reported to have drawn up would return to the centre of the debate, and the region would once again face the prospect of a wider war. For now, though, the president’s single word on Monday has given diplomacy something it has lacked for weeks: a public pause.
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