Updates with House vote
President Donald Trump's administration has stepped up assurances that it has no plans to resume military hostilities with Iran, a message that appeared to be at least partly aimed at staving off an attempt in Congress to impeach defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
"There's really no need for major combat operations any longer, because the blockade and the economic sanctions are doing devastation to" Iran's economy, secretary of state Marco Rubio told reporters in Paris on Tuesday, where he was attending a G7 foreign ministerial.
Rubio was echoing comments Trump made on Monday, when the president noted: "We don't think there's going to be any reason to use" military force against Iran.
Trump has given such assurances before, only to then order strikes against Iran. Conversely, Trump has also repeatedly threatened to step up attacks against Iran, only to then pursue a diplomatic course. But the sudden switch to ruling out military force, after weeks of threatening to use it, reflects concerns voiced by many Republicans — including Trump himself — that the war was a key cause of their party's rout at the polls last week.
Representative Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), a vocal critic of Trump and Hegseth, on Monday filed a resolution calling for impeaching Hegseth on eight counts. But the Republican-led House of Representatives voted 211-204 on Tuesday to refer the resolution to the Judiciary Committee, effectively putting an end to the impeachment effort in the lame duck session.
Massie's justifications for impeaching Hegseth included waging a war against Iran and Yemen without legal justification; for "kidnapping" former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife; for carrying out "extrajudicial killings" against suspected drug traffickers; and for threatening to retaliate against senator Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), a former Navy captain, for calling on the US military personnel to refuse to execute unlawful orders.
No other Republican joined Massie in voting to push forward with impeachment. But Democratic lawmakers have indicated they will try again to impeach Hegseth when they take control of Congress in January.
"The Democrats' attempt to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has miserably FAILED," Trump said in a social media post, attributing the result to "Victories in Venezuela and Iran" and a "Spirit like rarely seen before."
Hegseth, in a news briefing before the House vote on Tuesday, called Massie's accusations "political disagreements" and defended the conduct of the war in Iran.
The military operations cited in the impeachment resolution were "lawfully ordered by the commander-in-chief, then ordered by myself," Hegseth said. "History will judge the Iran war quite differently than conventional wisdom right now."
Hegseth pushed back on vice president JD Vance's argument that "the reason we lost (the election) is the war". The war with Iran was "a necessary undertaking", Hegseth said.
Trump, during an 8 November appearance on CBS' 60 Minutes, said he did not disagree with Vance's statement. But Trump added, "The one thing (Vance) left out is, if you had it to do again, would you do it?". Trump said that he did not regret going to war with Iran. "That war has been won. Now they're withering away as a country, and they'll come and they'll make a deal."
But Iranian officials insist that the US must implement the commitments Trump agreed to in a June "memorandum of understanding" before negotiators can address other issues. The US appears to be prioritizing Iran's nuclear program in diplomacy with Tehran.
Iran's supreme national security council secretary Mohsen Rezaei, in a social media post on Monday, said the US "should surrender to the seven conditions Iran has repeatedly set out". Rezaei described reported US-Iranian talks as "imaginary".
Iran "is demanding reparations," Rubio said on Tuesday. "They're demanding pallets of cash, which the president has made clear is not going to happen."
Trump in June agreed to the repatriation of Iran's frozen assets in foreign banks, estimated to be at least $24bn. The US-Iran interim deal that spelled out other concessions to Tehran fell apart after less than a month.
