Vance has been personally running indirect Iran talks for two weeks, two sources say

Vice President JD Vance has spent the past two weeks personally involved in indirect talks with Iran aimed at a new ceasefire and a return to nuclear negotiations, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter who spoke to Axios. Vance's office declined to comment.

The sources said Vance has been speaking almost daily with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani and Pakistani Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir. White House envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump adviser Jared Kushner are also involved.

The letter to Tehran

Two weeks ago, Vance sent a letter to Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, proposing to resume direct negotiations. Rezaei is described as one of the closest confidants of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. Iranian officials said the letter created positive momentum, according to Axios.

The mediators say there has been progress, but it has been very slow. Vance and the Qatari and Pakistani mediators have discussed a working-level technical meeting between U.S. and Iranian officials in the coming days. It has not taken place.

U.S. officials and regional sources say President Trump is willing to let diplomacy play out and see whether a deal is possible. Asked Friday, Nov. 6, what his message to Iran was, Trump told reporters: "We're talking to them." Axios reported that Trump also spoke Friday morning with Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim al-Thani about Doha's efforts to bridge the gaps. The military is also ready to launch renewed strikes on a relatively short timetable if Trump orders them.

A track record of deals that did not hold

This is not Vance's first run at an Iran agreement. According to Axios, he led the U.S. team at an April summit in Islamabad and was involved in the talks behind a U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding in June.

He later led the U.S. delegation to direct talks in Switzerland, which ended with Iran committing to invite UN inspectors to its nuclear facilities. Then the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps resumed attacks on ships, and the memorandum collapsed.

The war itself began at the end of February, when Trump launched it alongside Israel. Vance was the most skeptical voice in Trump's inner circle beforehand and argued for a diplomatic route.

"The reason we lost is the war"

The back-channel work follows Vance's blunt post-election statement. On Wednesday, Nov. 4, he wrote on X: "The real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone … The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night."

He wrote that Republican data analysts saw turnout as fine. In Florida, he said, the electorate was nine points more Republican than Democratic, only a couple of points worse than 2024. The problem, in his telling, was that many 2024 Trump-Vance voters backed Democrats this year.

Vance said a pollster asked those defectors what would bring them back. The top four answers, he said, were ending the war, focusing on cost of living and inflation, putting America First, and changing the relationship with Israel. "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," he wrote.

Trump's position

Trump has not backed away from the war. In a Tuesday phone interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said "Iran was a piece of it" when asked about the election. He also said: "I don't think about it. I did the right thing. I would have done it again."

On Fox's "Hannity," Trump has defended the campaign as stopping "the road to a nuclear weapon for Iran," calling Iran the world's top state sponsor of terror. He has called it "a very soft war" and said additional strikes could be carried out "in one hour." He cited Operation Midnight Hammer, the 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

The president says the war was right and Iran was only part of the election result. His vice president says it was the main reason. Both are now on record, and the administration is pursuing talks anyway.

The 2028 question

The Guardian described Vance's statement as a sign he is distancing himself from an unpopular war ahead of a possible 2028 run. CommsTrader, summarizing an Axios report, says Vance has privately criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war. It also says Netanyahu had pushed Trump to resume strikes before the midterms. Natan Sachs of the Middle East Institute told Fox News Digital that low-level friction with Netanyahu gives Vance room to separate himself from the administration without criticizing Trump.

Vance has not publicly said that is his motive. His stated one is that the war cost Republicans the Senate.

The next concrete step is whether the working-level technical meeting the mediators have discussed actually takes place. That would be the first visible sign that the weeks of quiet diplomacy have produced something beyond letters and phone calls. Until then, the U.S. has a ceasefire proposal on the table, a collapsed June memorandum behind it, and a military on standby.