President Donald Trump said Sunday that the United States and Iran are returning to negotiations. “It begins tomorrow afternoon. We’ll see,” he said.
Trump said he had canceled planned strikes this weekend at the request of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar – in addition to Iran – and they urged him instead to pursue talks with Tehran.
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“They think there’s a deal,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he traveled back to Washington from his golf club in New Jersey. “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,” he said.
Iranian officials said Sunday they were close to finalizing a deal with Oman to reopen passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow international waterway that flows between them in the Persian Gulf.
Trump officials have said in recent weeks that they were talking to Tehran behind the scenes even as attacks continued, assertions that Iran has repeatedly denied. Regional mediators have said they were passing messages between them.
Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, Trump has been mired in an unpopular war with no end in sight.
The fresh round of talks are the latest effort to end hostilities and follow the collapse of a ceasefire and memorandum of understanding signed in mid-June.
At least 18 U.S. service members have been killed in the Iran war, including four in recently renewed hostilities after Trump declared last month that a U.S.-Iran ceasefire was “over.” More than 600 American service members have been wounded.
After the failure of the ceasefire, the U.S. ramped up its strikes on Iran and reimposed a naval blockade against all ships attempting to arrive at or leave Iranian ports. Iran has escalated attacks on countries in the region where U.S. troops are stationed, including Kuwait and Jordan, as well as on ships attempting to navigate the strait without Tehran’s permission.
Iran first blocked the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point for oil and natural gas leaving the Persian Gulf, just days after the start of the war. The June agreement called for it to be “immediately” reopened with no impediments for 60 days and for Iran and Oman to “conduct dialogue … to define the future administration” of the passage.
But while Iran and Oman have held a series of discussions, Iran has continued to publicly insist that it have control of the strait, through which it intends to charge a toll, while the U.S., and much of the rest of the world, has said Iran should have no say in the crossings – a stance Tehran says is a violation of the agreement.
In a social media post on Sunday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran “must try to force the enemy to adhere to what he signed,” an apparent reference to the disputed interpretation of the agreement.
Raz Zimmt of the Institute for National Security Studies, an independent think tank in Israel, said part of the dilemma for the U.S is that military options would do little to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“The Iranians may pay a heavy price, but from their perspective, the price they will exact is at least equal, so it won’t help,” Zimmt said, adding that “what could be done via airstrikes has already been done.”
Trump’s decision to pause the strikes came after reports that Israel and the U.S. were set to attack Iran’s energy infrastructure. In response, Iranian security officials told state media that the country would retaliate by striking Israeli and U.S. energy facilities in the region, escalating concerns in Persian Gulf countries that host American troops and from energy companies.
Last week, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen launched strikes on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities and announced a blockade of Saudi ships in the Red Sea. Other U.S. allies, like Kuwait, are reeling from successive Iranian attacks on vital desalination infrastructure.
Karen DeYoung, Ellen Nakashima and Pranshu Verma contributed to this report.
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