U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday reject Iran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, saying he might instead begin bombing again after the U.S. mid-term elections in November.
“They made a proposal, but I rejected it,” Trump said as he left the White House Saturday morning.
On Thursday, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran had offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz under a phased deal with the United States. At the time, a U.S. official described the talks as “positive and constructive.”
The official, speaking to Alhurra on Friday, said the discussions were held through intermediaries but that the United States had been “in no rush” to reach an agreement.
Washington was in “a very strong position,” the official said, pointing to what President Donald Trump has often claimed as “total control” of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Over the last 48 hours, nearly 40 million barrels of oil have transited the Strait,” the official said on Friday.
Before the war with Iran began on Feb. 28, an average of about 20 million barrels of oil a day passed through the strait, accounting for roughly 20 percent of global seaborne oil trade.
“President Trump’s rejection of the Iranian offer was not surprising, given the Iranian Revolutionary Guards had insisted that the Iranian offer include [the] lifting of sanctions and un-freezing of assets,” Tom Warrick, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told MBN. “To Washington, this comes at the end of a deal over the Iranian nuclear file, not even before talks even start.”
The U.S. State Department as designed the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization.
Nearly seven months into the war, the waterway has emerged as one of the most consequential bargaining chips in the negotiations.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday that Tehran had given Washington a “concrete” proposal.
According to The New York Times, Araghchi conveyed the proposal through intermediaries to Steve Witkoff, the American envoy. It called for an end to hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon; the lifting of the American blockade on Iranian ports; the release of frozen Iranian funds; and sanctions exemptions for Iranian oil exports. Tehran would then reopen the strait on the seventh day.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that any agreement would require sustained negotiations and that Trump continues to have a range of options, including military action.
Iran, meanwhile, has signaled that it wants the fighting to end. In an interview with Fox New on Thursday, President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tehran did not want the war to continue and that the decision on whether to end it rested with Washington. He said Iran was prepared to reach an agreement.
Esmail Baghaei, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said recent contacts had been aimed at conveying Tehran’s conditions and reaffirming its positions, according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency, ISNA.
The dispute is about more than simply reopening the strait, according to Spencer Faragasso, a senior researcher at the Institute for Science and International Security. The two sides are also at odds over the arrangements that would govern the waterway after the war, he said, with Washington seeking a return to the conditions that existed before the fighting began.
Faragasso added there has been no progress so far on the nuclear negotiations. Although the Iranian proposal includes a commitment to negotiate over the nuclear program, he said, it does not make clear what those negotiations would ultimately produce.
Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at RANE, said an interim agreement might have a better chance of succeeding if the two sides separated some of the issues and left others for later negotiations. Among the more difficult questions, he said, are Washington’s demand for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and Tehran’s call for a freeze in the conflict in Yemen.
A memorandum of understanding signed in June could provide a framework for the talks. It called for a halt to military operations, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to navigation and 60 days of negotiations toward a final agreement.
But the memorandum itself has become a source of disagreement. The Washington Post reported that Tehran had interpreted the document as granting it control over the strait, an interpretation rejected by Washington and its regional allies.
