US official says White House believes the chances of reaching a settlement with Iran may be dwindling, while the official notes Istanbul and Doha are the most likely locations if a meeting takes place between US VP Vance and Iran's Rezaei

US official says White House believes the chances of reaching a settlement with Iran may be dwindling, while the official notes Istanbul and Doha are the most likely locations if a meeting takes place between US VP Vance and Iran's Rezaei.

Anonymous-sourced signals that diplomacy is stalling are a standard feature of US-Iran negotiation cycles, where public pessimism has historically served both as genuine readout and as leverage, and the two are difficult to separate in real time. The naming of specific host venues is the more substantive element: talks held in established third-party intermediaries of this kind have tended to indicate a channel is alive even when the rhetoric sours, whereas a collapse in venue planning has more often marked the true breakdown point. The involvement of figures at this level on both sides suggests a direct rather than purely back-channel track, which past episodes show raises both the potential payoff and the headline sensitivity around it. For crude, the established pattern in this sequence is a geopolitical premium that builds on breakdown headlines and bleeds out on confirmed meetings, transmitted through front-dated contracts and options skew rather than the back end, with freight and insurance costs in the Gulf as the tell for how seriously physical markets are pricing escalation. The follow-ons worth noting are confirmation or denial from either capital, any scheduling of the meeting itself, and whether the rhetoric shifts from settlement language to consequence language, which in prior cycles has marked the transition from negotiating posture to policy.