President Donald Trump is planning to resume strikes on Iran after the midterm elections, with his domestic political power set to wane during his final two years in office, and his attention expected to shift to foreign policy.

The Trump administration has briefed Gulf allies to prepare for a short, intense round of strikes as soon as Nov. 4, the day after the midterms, according to three senior Gulf Arab officials, granted anonymity to share sensitive discussions.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on the Trump administration’s briefings to Gulf Arab countries.

Washington’s Gulf allies are pushing hard to de-escalate, worried about how Iran will retaliate.

One Gulf official said they “would not be surprised” if some Gulf states pushed back on U.S. carrying out strikes from bases in their countries.

The U.S. has not struck Iran since Sept. 1, more than six months into the war Washington launched with Israel that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Trump has pledged no new attacks before the midterms, while Iran has continued to threaten shipping traffic in the vital Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. is blockading Iranian ports to pressure Tehran.

“We do not comment on sensitive military plans that may or may not exist. President Trump keeps all options on the table to ensure that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon,” said a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Trump said Friday that the war with Iran “is going to be over very soon.”

“We’re knocking the hell out of them,” Trump said in an interview with Kansas City radio station KCMO. Trump predicted that “we’re going to have a non-nuclear Iran. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and they won’t have a nuclear weapon, and that’s going to end very soon.”

But Trump’s path to further increase military pressure on Iran is complicated by a Republican base increasingly split over Iran and America’s role in the world.

“It’s a tough situation because of the base,” said a former Trump administration official in regular touch with Trump’s inner circle, granted anonymity to speak candidly about Trump’s deliberations. “I would say that what President Trump is focused on is the threat from Iran, not just the nuclear threat, but terrorism.”

In addition to trying to destroy Iran’s nuclear program — much of which is lodged deep underground — Trump has said he wants Iran to stop supporting proxy militant groups and using terrorism to project power in the region.

Around two-thirds of Americans, 65% disapprove of the way President Donald Trump is handling U.S. military action in Iran, with Republican and Republican-leaning independents growing more negative about the conflict, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

Trump has long been fixated on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and some around him expect that once the midterms are behind him, he will focus more on his foreign policy legacy.

“He’s obsessed with Iran not getting a nuclear weapon,” said another former Trump administration official who is familiar with Trump administration foreign policy deliberations. “He’s been convinced that with this final attack we can get a deal with the Iranians, or we can finally destroy their nuclear program.”

In an interview Sunday with Fox News, Trump said Iran’s Pickaxe mountain, a deeply buried site connected with Iran’s nuclear program, could be a potential U.S. target.

“We can read the badge on somebody’s shirt from space, okay? We know exactly what’s going on at Pickaxe Mountain. We know the other three [nuclear sites] are obliterated,” Trump said.

Speaking last week on the campaign trail in Florida, Trump said if Iran doesn’t agree to make concessions on its nuclear program, the U.S. will have to launch more attacks.

“We may do another little Epic Fury,” Trump said, using the name the Pentagon gave to the bombing campaign the U.S. launched with Israel in February. “Or they’ll agree. If they’re smart, they’ll just say, ‘let’s get down to business.’”

Trump’s team is making one last push at diplomacy as the U.S. builds up its forces in the region.

Vice President JD Vance recently sent a letter to Gen. Mohsen Rezaei, a hardline former Revolutionary Guard commander who became secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council in August, pitching a meeting between Iranian and American officials to resume talks, according to two people familiar with the matter, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

Qatari mediators were back in Tehran on Friday to push for a deal between the U.S. and Iran as the tiny Gulf state has stepped up its diplomatic efforts over the past week. Qatar has proposed a seven-day plan to address Washington’s and Tehran’s concerns, including confidence-building steps the sides could take, one of the people familiar with the discussions said. Envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are involved, the two people said.

At the same time, the U.S. is sending a third aircraft carrier strike group, led by the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and some 9,000 sailors and Marines toward the Middle East, alongside other ships. U.S. officials have said these forces will arrive at the end of November.

The U.S. has also bolstered defenses in the region, moving additional Patriot batteries to Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Washington has ordered most government employees in Saudi Arabia to leave the country and has reduced staffing at missions in Lebanon, the UAE, Qatar and Jordan after warning last week that Iran has significantly stepped up attempts to attack American personnel stationed in the Middle East. The State Department also cited concerns about attacks on Saudi Arabia from the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen and possible spillover in the region.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said he recently attended a classified briefing about Trump’s war plans should he restart military operations, which he said could include targeting civilian infrastructure.

“Their plan is insane,” he said at a think tank event in Washington earlier this week. “The plan that they have developed will lead in my view to a prolongment and an escalation of this war that will be devastating for our security interests.”

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As Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner try to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, they are chasing a second prize: trillions of dollars in investment deals the Kremlin has dangled in front of President Donald Trump and his team.

Trump’s envoys hope those deals could be a win-win for Washington and Moscow.

But current and former American officials, European officials and Russia analysts said Trump and his team have vastly overestimated the business opportunities for American companies in Russia.

The Russian economy is uninvestable, they said, and will be for some time.

The megaprojects the Trump team favors are ambitious and capital intensive. Broad benefits for American companies and the American economy are unlikely. The more plausible winners, the officials and analysts said, are people in Trump’s circle who might be positioned to secure lucrative deals.

“There are influential voices in President Trump’s orbit who have an excessively rosy or optimistic assessment of the potential upside for U.S. companies in the Russian economy,” said Ludovic Hood, a veteran diplomat who was chief of staff to Trump’s former special presidential envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, and worked on the diplomatic efforts.

The lure of investment deals is clouding the Trump administration’s view on how to help negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, said Hood, who is now at the Hudson Institute.

“Some voices are so wedded to this naively rosy assessment of commercial upside that it has had a detrimental impact on President Trump’s quest to preside over ending the war in Ukraine,” Hood said.

Others briefed on some of the diplomatic discussions agreed.

“They are overestimating the possibilities and, frankly, the viability of some of what they’re looking at,” said a Senate Democratic aide, who was granted anonymity to describe the closed-door briefings.

“When it comes to Russia’s most sensitive and most lucrative industries,” the aide said, “they are never going to be willing to work with our folks on that in a sustainable manner.”

“We do tend to think that the negotiation team is rather naive when they talk about these prospects,” the aide said.

Asked for comment, a White House official said Trump is seeking an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine “so the senseless killing ends.” The official was not authorized to speak publicly.

“The President and his team remain committed to continuing to play a constructive role in ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, and he remains optimistic that we’ll ultimately get a peace deal done,” the official said.

The Trump administration’s fixation on the business potential has been back in the spotlight as Witkoff presses to resume months of stalled diplomacy.

After Witkoff met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on Oct. 21, Kirill Dmitriev — Witkoff’s main Russian interlocutor who is close to Putin and runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — said Washington and Moscow are discussing a range of joint projects, such as data centers powered by small scale nuclear power plants.

Dmitriev said a recent deal for Russia to sell diesel fuel to American and global markets has broken the ice for other business links.

The Trump team has said publicly that business deals between Moscow and Washington would come after the fighting ends, but it has sought to work them out with Russia in diplomatic talks to try to incentivize Putin to compromise.

But they have been a significant part of the bilateral talks.

In a sign of their importance to the White House, Witkoff was photographed holding a note card in the St. Petersburg meeting noting three agenda items: thanking Putin, pushing for trilateral talks and the business deals.

Since Trump began talking to Putin early in his term, the business possibilities have always been a key appeal for him.

“I am in serious discussions with President Vladimir Putin of Russia concerning the ending of the War, and also major Economic Development transactions which will take place between the United States and Russia,” he said on Truth Social in February 2025.

Trump administration officials are falling for a tactic that Putin has employed for years, two European officials told MS NOW.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of relations with Russia, said that Putin and his allies have repeatedly exaggerated the profits that can be generated in Russia by U.S. and European corporations.

Extracting oil and rare earth minerals from remote corners of Russia is costly and time consuming. Russian infrastructure is antiquated, and the country’s economy remains small compared to the U.S. and Europe.

“Look at the statistics,” said the second European official about the size of Russia’s economy. “There’s not much there.”

Washington would be betting on a market in decline.

Russia’s growth slowed to about 1% in 2025, its middle class is shrinking and the Kremlin plans to spend roughly 35% of its 2027 budget on the military.

Even before the full-scale invasion, the market was modest: some 1,500 foreign companies tracked by the Kyiv School of Economics earned a combined $18 billion in profit in 2021, on revenue of $318 billion. Russia’s current annual economic output is $2.5 trillion, smaller than France’s.

The European officials also warned that Putin has seized control of past joint ventures that were launched by foreign companies and nationalized them. They predicted that would happen again.

“This won’t last long,” the European official said. “ In the end, Russia always confiscates.”

The megaprojects that are of most interest to the Trump team are fraught with difficulty, analysts said. Most surveys of Russia’s Arctic oil and mineral reserves date to Soviet times, so it is hard to know how much can be extracted at a profit.

Rare earths located in Russia’s far north are harder still to get to. China dominates the world’s rare-earth mining and refining and has refused to share its know-how with Moscow, wary of creating a rival.

Beyond the challenge of realizing any of the potential opportunities, Russia is the most sanctioned economy in the world.

Undoing the tens of thousands of restrictions imposed by the U.S. and Europe since 2014 and especially after 2022 will be extremely complicated. While Trump can lift some on his own, he would need to consult Congress for others, and Europe has many of its own sanctions that would have to be lifted.

Western companies have had mixed fortunes in Russia, and since 2022, Moscow has imposed rules that make doing business there, or leaving, even more punishing for Western firms.

“Doing business with Russia right now carries an enormous level of political, legal, operational, and reputational risk, and even doing this with the president as your lead negotiator, doesn’t necessarily reduce any of those risks,” said Charles Hecker, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and the author of a 2024 history of Western business in Russia.

Vaughn Hillyard contributed reporting.

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