A senior Iranian official has contacted Washington offering to return to the negotiation table, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday morning, citing Arab and U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, whose authority has grown after the targeted killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday, issued the proposal via Omani officials, the report continued.
The Journal said that Larijani is now running Tehran’s military effort against the United States and Israel, although he is not member of the triumvirate established to run the country after the supreme leader’s death.
The request was presumably made hours after the war broke out.
Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi meanwhile said on Sunday that “the door to diplomacy remains open.”
He said that “genuine progress” had been made in the indirect U.S.-Iran talks in Geneva before the bombing campaign began and that “war should not mean that the hope of peace is extinguished.”
I want to be very clear - the door to diplomacy remains open. Talks in Geneva made genuine progress towards an unprecedented agreement between Iran and the United States and although the hope was to avoid war, war should not mean that the hope of peace is extinguished. I still…
— Badr Albusaidi - بدر البوسعيدي (@badralbusaidi) March 1, 2026
U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday told The Atlantic that Iran’s new leadership has reached out to him in an effort to renew negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program.
“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long,” Trump said over the phone from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The president added that most Iranian officials who were involved in negotiations in recent weeks “are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone, because that was a big—that was a big hit. They should have done it sooner. They could have made a deal. They should’ve done it sooner. They played too cute.”
The U.S. military and the Israel Defense Forces launched a joint preemptive attack against the Islamic Republic on Feb. 28, resulting in a dramatic decapitation of Iran’s top political and military leaders.
