With shifting Iran rhetoric following US elections, Trump leaves Mideast in limbo about path ahead
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With shifting Iran rhetoric following US elections, Trump leaves Mideast in limbo about path ahead
AP News-Nov14th2026
By AAMER MADHANI, MATTHEW LEE and BEN FINLEY
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has had a lot to say about his thinking on the way ahead in the Iran war since Republicans were trounced in last week’s midterm elections.
In exchanges with reporters, broadcast interviews and social media posts since Election Day, he’s somehow managed to back away from carrying out additional strikes while also backing away from the prospect of additional talks with the Islamic Republic’s negotiators on ending the 8-month-old conflict.
The president acknowledged on the day after the midterms that the war and the global economic tumult it’s caused were partly to blame for Republicans’ electoral losses, while maintaining it was the right thing to do.
Then, at the start of this week, he huddled with Qatar’s prime minister at the White House and afterward told reporters that he believed it was highly unlikely he’d need to order new major strikes on Iran, declaring that the war “militarily is effectively over.”
But by Thursday, he was again raising questions about whether he needed to rush to find an endgame. He declared that the U.S. no longer needs a deal with Tehran and brusquely directed Vice President JD Vance — who served as his chief negotiator in earlier peace talks with Iran — to shift his attention to the administration’s domestic anti-fraud campaign.
All the while, Trump warned Iran that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” and keeping an eye on Pickaxe Mountain, a facility linked to Iran’s nuclear program, for signs of activity.
“If something does not work out, I would not hesitate” to act, Trump told conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt on Thursday.
Iran war will shadow Trump during his trip to Asia
Trump’s tonal shifts have only added to the uncertainty about what comes next in a war in which America’s allies were not consulted before it was started but nonetheless struggle to deal with its economic ramifications.
“President Trump is now acting like an arsonist who has set ablaze our foreign policy,” Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said in an interview Friday on the sidelines of the Democrats’ postelection gathering in Denver. “And now he just wants to walk away.”
The president’s ambiguous positioning on the war is expected to loom large during a visit next week to the Philippines and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in the Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen.
While in Shenzhen, Trump will hold an unprecedented three-way summit with China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Trump is expected to discuss Iran and the three powers’ nuclear stockpiles with Xi and Putin.
The White House declined to comment directly to queries on Trump’s postelection rhetoric on Iran. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio underscored that Trump’s approach is leading to the Iranian economy collapsing.
“The economic pain that we are inflicting on that regime is so great that there’s no need for military action because we’ve weakened them so much,” Rubio said in a Friday evening speech to the Federalist Society.
Read more on original:https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-talks-strikes-limbo-02378df1ec3073d2c0f8f162e697d181
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