President Donald Trump on Monday demanded that Iran pay compensation for decades of attacks attributed to Tehran, including the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and operations linked to the late Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani, in a Truth Social post that directly countered Iran’s own request for war reparations from the United States. The declaration, posted at 11:31 a.m. on August 10, escalates the rhetorical standoff between Washington and Tehran just as negotiations over reopening the Strait of Hormuz appeared to be stalling, and it introduces an entirely new financial demand into a diplomatic process that had already shown signs of strain.
Trump’s demand had not previously been raised by the U.S. in talks or statements, and the president said it would be part of all future negotiations with the Iranian leadership. In his post, Trump wrote that he had noticed Iranian officials asking for compensation over damage sustained during “the last five month Military Conflict,” a war he said began “because THEY WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON,” and stressed that the issue “was never mentioned in any of our negotiations or meetings.” He went on to say that Iran’s own request had given him an idea: “It is an interesting idea because now I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts, for which they are famous, as led initially by General Soleimani, including the families of those killed on the USS Cole, and thousands of others killed in combat.”
Trump did not stop at military casualties. He extended his demand to civilian victims of the Iranian government going back half a century, writing: “Additionally, compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protestors that Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months.” He closed the post by saying he had “instructed my representatives to put this firmly into any, and all, future negotiations,” before signing off, “Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 10, 2026
Trump followed the initial post with a second message on Truth Social shortly afterward, broadening the scope of his compensation demand beyond attacks on Americans to include Iran’s regional proxies. “Also, with respect to the Iran negotiations, Iran should be responsible for the damages and death caused to the people of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza,” Trump wrote in the follow-up post.
The reference to Soleimani ties Trump’s demand to one of the most consequential episodes of his first term. “General Soleimani” refers to Iranian arch-terrorist and IRGC Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike on his vehicle in Baghdad in January 2020, at the end of Trump’s first term as president. The USS Cole reference points to a much earlier attack: the USS Cole was a U.S. warship docked in Aden, Yemen, that was attacked by al-Qaeda terrorists on October 12, 2000, when two suicide pilots detonated a small bomb-laden boat, blasting a 40-foot hole in the vessel. Iran has long faced accusations, which it denies, of providing support to militant networks operating across the region, though direct Iranian responsibility for the Cole bombing has not been formally established by U.S. authorities.
Trump’s post came in direct response to demands laid out days earlier by a senior Iranian security official. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued a statement carried by Iranian state media calling for the United States to lift its naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, withdraw U.S. military forces from around Iran, pay war reparations, release frozen Iranian assets, and end attacks on Iran’s regional allies as conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had separately said that reopening the strait was contingent on the United States compensating Iran for what he described as violations of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, the ceasefire framework brokered by Pakistani mediators in June.
The Islamabad agreement had called for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a temporary lifting of oil sanctions on Iran, but its vague language left the United States and Iran with sharply differing interpretations of its terms. Washington backed a southern shipping route that skirted Oman’s coastline and avoided Iranian waters, while Iran warned against and ultimately struck vessels using that route, causing the ceasefire to collapse and prompting the United States to reimpose its naval blockade of Iranian ports. Araghchi accused Washington of trying to establish new routes through the strait “despite the warnings issued by our country,” calling any violation of Iran’s management of the waterway “absolutely unacceptable to the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Iran’s foreign ministry has said in recent days that Tehran is not currently engaged in direct talks with the United States, even as Iranian and Omani officials continue negotiating a separate arrangement for a temporary shipping corridor through the strait. Vice President JD Vance, addressing the state of negotiations in a Fox News interview over the weekend, characterized the talks as being in “the middle of the game” and said the United States was working to establish a traffic scheme that would allow ships to pass safely, including demining efforts and a commitment from Iran not to fire on commercial vessels. Vance argued that Washington retains significant leverage over Tehran, saying of the Iranian government, “They’re hurting in a big way. They want this thing to be over. The question is whether they’re able, their system is able, to give the things that are necessary for us to be happy.”
Trump offered a similar assessment in an interview with Axios published Sunday, describing the U.S. posture toward Iran as “only semi-negotiating” and suggesting he was prepared to let continued economic pressure, rather than further military strikes, force Tehran’s hand. “We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump told Axios, adding that the administration was “low-keying” its approach to the conflict for the time being.
Energy markets reacted swiftly to the compensation demand and the broader uncertainty surrounding the strait negotiations. Brent crude, the international benchmark, climbed roughly 5 percent Monday to settle near $87.72 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures rose about 5 percent to close at $82.13 a barrel, extending a rally that has pushed Brent up more than 16 percent since the war between the United States, Israel and Iran began in late February. Traders cited the conflicting signals from Washington and Tehran, along with continuing attacks on shipping in the strait, as the primary drivers of the price increase. Shipping traffic through the waterway has collapsed during the conflict, with just over a dozen vessels per day navigating the strait in the past week compared with an average of 130 daily crossings before the war, according to maritime data firm Kpler.
The renewed hostility over reparations comes against a backdrop of continued attacks on commercial vessels in the strait. The United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministry said an Iranian strike targeted a tanker belonging to the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company as it crossed the waterway over the weekend, part of a pattern the company says has resulted in at least 15 attacks on its vessels since the war began, leaving one crew member dead and 20 injured. Oman’s foreign ministry condemned the attacks as violations of international law and territorial sovereignty, while urging all parties to avoid actions that could derail the progress made in its separate negotiations with Iran over the strait’s future management.
Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, has said Iranian officials view the Oman talks as addressing, at most, the mechanics of how the waterway might eventually reopen, and that Tehran is unlikely to implement any arrangement without a broader U.S. return to its commitments under the Islamabad memorandum, including a full lifting of the naval blockade. Araghchi and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian have faced domestic pressure from hardliners opposed to any accommodation with Washington, a dynamic analysts say may be shaping the tone of Tehran’s public demands.
With Trump now formally instructing U.S. negotiators to fold compensation claims into all future talks, and Iran maintaining its own reparations demand as a precondition for reopening Hormuz, the two positions leave little evident common ground. Neither side has signaled a willingness to accept the other’s terms, and the White House had not issued a formal response to Iran’s compensation request as of Monday. The dispute adds a new financial dimension to a conflict that began five months ago over Iran’s nuclear program and has since evolved into a broader struggle over sanctions, naval access and regional influence, with the outcome likely to shape both global energy prices and the political landscape heading into November’s midterm elections.