FILE- This combination of pictures shows US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on the left, and Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on the right — EVELYN HOCKSTEIN, Amer HILABI
Plans for U.S.-Iran nuclear talks on Friday are back on, after several Middle Eastern leaders urgently lobbied the Trump administration on Wednesday afternoon not to follow through on threats to walk away, two U.S. officials told Axios.
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.
Why it matters: The standoff had sparked fears across the Middle East that President Trump would pivot to military action. At least nine countries from the region reached out to the White House at the highest levels strongly urging the U.S. not to cancel the meeting.
“They asked us to keep the meeting and listen to what the Iranians have to say. We have told the Arabs that we will do the meeting if they insist. But we are very skeptical,” one U.S. official said.
A second U.S. official said the Trump administration agreed to hold the meeting “to be respectful” to U.S. allies in the region and “in order to continue pursuing the diplomatic track.”
The U.S. and Iran had agreed to meet on Friday in Istanbul, with other Middle Eastern countries participating as observers.
But the Iranians said on Tuesday that they wanted to move the talks to Oman and hold them in a bilateral format, to ensure that they focused only on nuclear issues and not other matters like missiles that are priorities for the U.S. and countries in the region.
U.S. officials were at first open to the request to change the location, then rejected it, before reversing course once again after Axios reported that the meeting was off.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed on X that talks were “scheduled to be held in Muscat on about 10 am Friday,” adding: “I’m grateful to our Omani brothers for making all necessary arrangements.”
“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 senior official said at the time, alluding to 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.
The U.S. officials said the U.S. and Iran had initially agreed to hold talks in Istanbul on two tracks:
Direct U.S.-Iran talks on a nuclear deal.
Multilateral talks on issues like Iran’s missile program, support for proxy groups, and human rights violations in the violent crackdown on protesters.
As of now, only bilateral talks on the nuclear issue are planned in Oman.
AXIOS
