President Trump Expects a Diplomatic Solution With Iran This Time, but Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi Says U.S.-Iran Talks Must Wait for Washington to "Digest" the Midterm Results After the "Shock" Paused the Peace Mediators’ Travels
Monday, November 9, 2026
The indirect talks between Washington and Tehran are on ice until the United States settles down from its midterm elections, Iran’s foreign minister said on Sunday — while President Donald Trump says the two sides were close to a deal before the vote and that he expects a diplomatic solution to happen this time. The two men are describing the same paused negotiation from opposite ends: Tehran says the mediators have stopped travelling and Washington needs time to absorb the result, and Trump says the election itself is what interrupted an agreement that was nearly there.
Trump laid out his side in a Sunday interview on 60 Minutes with Ross Douthat. Iran, he said, had been ready to settle: “they wanted to make a deal just before the election, and that gives them a little bit of a hope certificate now. But we were close to making a deal. If we didn’t have this election, we might have even had, or within the next few days, we would have had a deal. But this gives them hope.” The president also said he is not looking to escalate the war — “I’m not looking to. I don’t think there’s any reason to” — and that Iran has no nuclear capability left: “They have nothing. It’s buried under thousands of tons of rock.” At the same time, he stood by the original decision to strike: asked whether he would attack Iran again if he had it to do over, he said “my answer is an emphatic yes, because you can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.” To CNN the same day, Trump put the choice on Tehran: renewed U.S. attacks are “highly unlikely” if the talks hold, and “it depends on whether or not they sign a very strong agreement.”
Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, told state television that the election result itself is what froze the process: “US election results have shocked the mediators’ shuttle diplomacy; we need to wait a little. There has been no movement over the past few days, and the main reason is the results of the US election, which have ultimately come as a shock to everyone. It will take some time for the situation to calm down and for conditions to become favorable again for mediators to resume their visits. We need to be a little patient.” In the same remarks he put the pause in terms of Washington’s reaction: “We now have to see how long it will take for them to digest these results, in order to determine how we are going to move forward.” The mediators are Qatar and Pakistan, who have been carrying messages between Washington and Tehran; the indirect talks cover Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Araghchi had already set out Tehran’s terms in a written statement on X on Sunday. “American voters have made their choice,” he wrote, and he carried Tehran’s two-day proposal with it: meet the requirements, including ending the war on all fronts, and “you will see results” — “or choose war, and see our alert and battle-hardened Warriors rain down hell.” On Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told the ministry’s weekly press conference that the two-day proposal “is the most reasonable possible plan and remains on the table”: if the United States meets Iran’s demands, he said, security in the Strait of Hormuz could be restored within 48 hours and the region would see positive developments within two days. Iran’s demands, as its officials have stated them consistently, are an end to the war on all fronts, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, the lifting of oil sanctions, and an end to the U.S. counter-blockade of Iranian ports.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking Sunday at Homestead Air Reserve Base before flying to Paris for the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting, gave Washington’s reading of the same talks: “Right now it hasn’t been very productive, because the Iranian demands are simply not just unacceptable, but in some cases outrageous and ridiculous.” Eight months into the war, the fighting sits in a stalemate, a third U.S. carrier strike group is in the region, and on Trump’s account in the CNN interview, Iran’s economy is failing — he cited inflation of 301 percent — and it is that pressure, not any American wish for another round of bombing, that is bringing Tehran to the table.
What this means: for ordinary households, the difference between the two paths runs straight through daily costs. The Strait of Hormuz carries a large share of the world’s oil, and a diplomatic solution that reopens it fully and ends the war points toward lower fuel costs at home and no further burden on the American service members manning three carrier strike groups in the region. A breakdown points the other way — toward the kind of fighting that has already pushed prices up during this war. On Sunday, both capitals said the talks are paused; the president said he expects them to end in a deal, and Tehran said the next move depends on how long Washington takes to digest its election.
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