As of this moment, US-Iran talks are scheduled for Oman tomorrow morning local time. The Jerusalem Post reported that White House envoy Steve Witkoff landed in Oman today.
But the whipsaw effect threatened yesterday to blow the whole diplomatic effort apart. About mid-day U.S. Eastern time, the meeting appeared to be canceled until several Middle Eastern leaders urgently lobbied the Trump administration not to follow through on threats to walk away, Axios reported yesterday afternoon, citing two unnamed U.S. officials.
The talks will be held in Oman, as Iran insisted, despite the U.S. initially rejecting changes to the original plan to meet in Istanbul. Those changes were to move the talks from Istanbul to Muscat, making the talks strictly bilateral and limiting the agenda to Iran’s nuclear program.
But hours earlier, it looked as though there were going to be no talks at all. “We told them it is this or nothing, and they said, ‘Ok, then nothing,’” a senior U.S. official had told Axios earlier on Wednesday. “We want to reach a real deal quickly or people will look at other options,” the official said at the time, alluding to President Trump’s repeated threats of military action. “We didn’t want to be flexible here, because if there is a deal, it has to be real. We didn’t want to go back to the old way of doing things,” another U.S. official said.
