Iran launched drones and missiles at Bahrain and Kuwait on Saturday night after a second wave of US air strikes, threatening an already shaky interim peace agreement between the two countries.
The renewed violence was sparked by Iran attacking a ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz on the Omani side as part of a UN-backed evacuation operation. Iran insists that under the terms of its increasingly fragile ceasefire deal with the US, it still controls the waterway.
“Iran strikes Bahrain and Kuwait after US air strikes; JD Vance secures IRGC-CENTCOM channel in Swiss talks.”
The escalation came as the US vice-president, JD Vance, was flying back to Washington aboard Air Force Two after marathon peace talks with the Iranians in Switzerland. Looking tired but upbeat, Vance told a reporter he had secured a concrete win.
“One of the things we wanted to come out with,” Vance said, “was a channel on the Iranian side” for reducing conflict. “Which we did. They were like, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll send somebody from the IRGC to go hang out in Doha with somebody from CENTCOM,’ and that’s how we’re going to settle a lot of these disputes.”
Vance, who had exchanged his suit and tie for a sweater and jeans, was accompanied by his wife, Usha, heavily pregnant and resting on the nearby bed. The vice president is widely seen as the team captain of the “restrainer” faction within the Trump administration — reluctant to intervene abroad and seeking a rebalancing of US power toward the homeland. But the outbreak of outright hot war with Iran forced him to defend a conflict he had long resisted.
The communication channel — if it works — could serve as Vance’s electoral lifeline. Politically, Trump’s Iran war has become the biggest conundrum of the vice president’s career. By his own account, he must constantly tell a cohesive story about why he takes a given position, somehow reintegrating everything he has previously professed.
Whether the Doha channel can prevent further tit-for-tat attacks remains an open question. The strikes on Bahrain and Kuwait — US allies in the Gulf — suggest the pattern of retaliation is far from broken.