Negotiations to end the war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz are still at a standoff, after President Donald Trump objected to Iran’s latest proposal.
“They want to make a deal, but I’m not satisfied with it,” he said Friday at the White House.
Iran sent the proposal to Pakistani mediators Thursday evening, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency, which gave no details on its contents. Trump did not address the substance of the latest proposal or make clear what his objections were. He made almost identical comments when talking about an earlier proposal.
Two senior Iranian officials said the new proposal removed a previous condition Iran had set that Trump must first lift the sea blockade against Iran for negotiators to meet face to face. They both asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
The proposal called for nuclear negotiations to be postponed for a second phase of talks to take place after a permanent ceasefire was reached, the two officials said.
A previous Iranian proposal, delivered last week, called on the United States to end its naval blockade and would have postponed negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
The president has repeatedly insisted that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, while Iran has rejected U.S. proposals to suspend its nuclear program and hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
Without a way forward, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively shut. Both the U.S. Navy and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have stringently limited which ships can use the waterway, reducing the flow of oil, natural gas and other crucial materials out of the Persian Gulf to a trickle and causing ripple effects for the world economy.
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The negotiating gulf widened Thursday when Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who has been in hiding since the war began, issued a rare statement vowing that Iran would manage the Strait of Hormuz under “new legal frameworks” and would retain its nuclear capabilities.
“The bright future of the Persian Gulf region will be a future without America,” he said.
Shipping companies and their insurers fear that Iran has mined the main channels in the strait and could attack commercial vessels. That has deterred most of the hundreds of ships in the Persian Gulf from trying to leave.
Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed the suggestion that Iran could eventually make money from the strait, after Iran included a plan to charge fees to passing tankers in its proposal Sunday.
“This is not the Suez Canal, this is not the Panama Canal, these are international waters,” said Rubio, adding that the United States would not tolerate a “system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it.”
In an earlier offer, Iran proposed suspending uranium enrichment for five years, followed by five years of very low-grade civilian enrichment in laboratories. Under that proposal, half of Iran’s 972-pound stockpile of highly enriched uranium would have gone to Russia, an ally, and the other half would have been available to international inspectors.
The United States, which has demanded that Iran suspend all nuclear activity for 20 years and hand over its highly enriched uranium, rejected the offer.
There have been weeks of stop-start negotiations in Pakistan, which has been mediating between the United States and Iran to try to end the war. Trump called off a round of peace talks in Islamabad last weekend.
After a first round of negotiations to extend the truce collapsed, Trump said last week that he was indefinitely continuing the extension.
Iran’s Nuclear Program
Some of the core sticking points between the United States and Iran are the scope of Iran’s uranium enrichment program and the fate of its stockpile of enriched uranium. Iran insists it has a right to enrich nuclear fuel under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Trump has repeatedly said that he will not allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon. But he is also confronting the complicated legacy of his decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal” to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.
That Obama-era agreement — formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA — would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. But once Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree much sooner, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever before.
Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half-ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level close to what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Trump bombed in June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a small fraction of the problem.
Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal.
Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal.
Clash of Negotiating Styles
Trump views himself as the master of coercive diplomacy, forcing his opponents to capitulate quickly to American demands or face the threat of attack.
But in dealing with Iran over the past six weeks, he has discovered that he is up against a nation that prides itself on resilience and delay.
“Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership is stubborn and tenacious,” said Robert Malley, who negotiated with the Iranians in the lead-up to the 2015 nuclear deal and again in a failed effort by the Biden administration.
The last big U.S.-Iran negotiation, completed 11 years ago, took the better part of two years, moving from secret talks with a then-new Iranian president with a pragmatic bent to a full-scale negotiation involving scores of meetings.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
By The New York Times/Eric Lee
c.2026 The New York Times Company
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