WASHINGTON (TNND) — President Donald Trump said the United States is entering a new round of discussions to ease the war with Iran after backing off threats to unleash massive new strikes on the country after weeks of stalled negotiations.
Getting Tehran to the table and making headway on the administration’s central demands, returning traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and Iran giving up its nuclear enrichment ambitions, has become increasingly difficult as the conflict has continued.
Iran has denied it is engaged in a new round of talks and said it is focusing on negotiations with neighboring countries, adding another layer of difficulty to finding a diplomatic solution to a war that has mostly been stuck in place since the ceasefire fell apart in June. The conflicting accounts continued a pattern that has complicated previous diplomatic efforts.
It is the latest turnaround in months of stops and starts to fighting that have sporadically been paused for more attempts at diplomacy. So far, each attempt of peace talks has fallen through amid a series of tit-for-tat strikes that limit progress.
Trump has grown frustrated with the Iranian regime for months after what he has described as repeated flip-flopping over entering negotiations to solve the war diplomatically.
“Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They ask for a meeting, some would say ‘beg,’ talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that they’re not having any discussions, that nothing is being talked about, and they’re only dealing with ‘Oman.’”
That is in contrast from Sunday, when Trump said a deal was nearing after he opted to call off “the biggest attack since World War II.”
“They think there’s a deal,” Trump told reporters. “There’s a deal on Hormuz, and then there will be a deal on the nuclear or you might call it the denuclearization of Iran.”
Despite Trump’s optimism, mediators are still facing major hurdles in reopening the strait and reaching a deal over Iran’s nuclear program.
Restoring traffic through the strait, a narrow waterway where 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas passes through, is a priority for the administration. Passage has been mostly stalled throughout the conflict amid Iranian threats and attacks on ships, which has fueled a rise in energy prices and become a growing political headache for the administration as Americans also grow more frustrated about the war.
Iran’s grip on the strait has sent oil prices significantly higher over the last five months. While prices have fallen from the peaks of more than $100 a barrel during the height of the conflict, they are still higher than before the war and are likely to stay there as long as restoring traffic through the strait remains in doubt.
Prices for Brent crude, the international benchmark, dipped 5% at one point Monday on hopes a deal to reopen the strait could be reached.
Iranian officials said they were close to finalizing a deal with Oman, which has served as a primary intermediary throughout the conflict, to reopen the strait but have also insisted on maintaining ownership of the strait and its intention to charge a fee. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world view that as a nonstarter and want to return to the pre-war norm of ships having free passage.
After weathering five months of repeated strikes within Iran, a military blockade and the deaths of multiple leadership figures, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, there are questions as to whether the U.S. has enough leverage to get Iran to the table without offering significant concessions. Iran also has a powerful bargaining chip in its ability to cut off traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
The continued standoff over the strait underscores the challenges facing the Trump administration to secure a deal that doesn’t favor Tehran.
“The Strait of Hormuz has become Iran’s strategic weapon, even stronger than a nuclear weapon,” Chandler said. “If they give that up, they lose the biggest leverage they’ve got, because we’ve already set the nuclear program back militarily five-plus years just through our military actions, but they’ve really let the genie out of the bottle by controlling the Strait of Hormuz. They’re not going to give it up.”
The administration is also running into familiar obstacles over Iran’s nuclear program.
Throughout the five-month war, he has said mediators were close to reaching an agreement only to have it fall through. Even the memorandum of understanding left several key issues unresolved and questions about the ability to ensure Iran followed through on its promises.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to escalate the offensive against Tehran to hit new targets. Threats of reescalating the conflict have also run into opposition from surrounding countries in the Gulf, which have increasingly been targeted in retaliatory strikes by Iran and its proxy forces.
That has left the administration in a challenging position to find a path out of the conflict.
“There’s been deals made, but nothing that’s enforceable or that Iran complied with. So, you can either ignore the problem and walk away from it and realize this is what you’re going to live with, or you can try to solve it. But if you’re going to try to solve it, you got to go all the way, and that’s where our strategy has fallen down,” Chandler said.