President Donald Trump has privately told senior aides in recent weeks that he is willing to walk away from the war with Iran without securing a nuclear deal, so long as Tehran fully reopens the Strait of Hormuz, according to U.S. officials cited by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. The shift marks a significant scaling back of an objective the administration had spent months insisting was non-negotiable: guaranteeing Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.
The narrowed ambition ran into a fresh complication over the weekend. Iran on Saturday issued its steepest set of demands yet for permitting free passage through the strait, calling for billions of dollars in payments from Washington, the withdrawal of American troops from the region and the end of the U.S. naval blockade. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said the United States would also need to permanently end the war, lift all sanctions, unfreeze Iran’s assets, pay war reparations, cease what he called threats and insults, and halt military action against Iran’s regional militia allies before the strait would open, according to Iran’s state news agency IRNA.
The whiplash between Washington’s optimism and Tehran’s hardening position underscores how difficult it has become for Trump to engineer an exit from a conflict that began February 28, when the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes on Iranian military, government and infrastructure sites, according to ABC News. Iran responded by effectively sealing the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil normally flows, to foreign shipping.
“Iran’s recent hardline demands for reopening the strait make it increasingly difficult for the president to manufacture a face-saving off-ramp from the conflict,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Gregory Brew, an Iran expert at the Eurasia Group consulting firm, offered a similar read on Tehran’s calculus. “The Iranians fully believe Trump wants out and is focused on opening the strait, which is why they are playing hardball,” Brew said.
The administration’s pivot toward the strait as its primary metric of success followed months of failed attempts to fold denuclearization into a broader settlement. Talks between the two sides had been underway since April, anchored by the White House’s ultimatum that Iran would never be permitted to build a nuclear weapon. But those negotiations stalled, pushing the administration in recent weeks to elevate reopening commercial shipping lanes above the nuclear question as its central objective.
Trump has declared on several occasions that the strait was already fully open, only for each claim to prove premature. As recently as Thursday, he told reporters the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports meant the waterway was “sort of open right now,” while acknowledging Tehran still had the capacity to damage vessels with missiles, drones and mines.
The political backdrop adds urgency to Trump’s search for a resolution. With midterm elections less than three months away and gasoline prices still running well above pre-war levels, the president has been looking for a way to tell voters the war has been won. The average U.S. price of gasoline stood at $4.02 a gallon on Saturday, according to AAA, up from $3.16 a year earlier, though down slightly from the previous week.
On Friday, Trump used social media to suggest victory was already in hand even absent a nuclear agreement, linking to an article headlined “Donald Trump Won the Iran War.” Vice President JD Vance struck a similarly open-ended tone in an interview with Fox News, saying the administration would keep pressing Iran for long-term changes but was prepared to settle for less than a comprehensive deal. “And if not, that’s fine, too, we’re just going to keep on applying the pressure we can apply, and getting as much oil and gas out of the Middle East so that Americans can enjoy lower gas and energy prices,” Vance said, adding, “We’re in the middle of the game.”
Negotiations over the strait itself have run on a separate, and at times more promising, track through Oman, which has served as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Saturday that talks with Muscat over the “legal mechanism and management” of the strait were nearing completion, telling reporters, “We are very close to an agreement,” according to Fox News. He cautioned, however, that “the opening of the Strait of Hormuz is subject to other conditions, including compensation for violations of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding by the United States.” Under that memorandum, signed in June, Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian agreed to end the war while calling for the strait’s reopening and 60 days of nuclear talks.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had struck an optimistic note days earlier, telling reporters there had been “progress made … but not finality” on an agreement for free transit through the strait, and that he expected a resolution “very shortly.” Axios reported August 4 that the U.S., Iran and Oman were closing in on an interim agreement, with Washington at one point aiming for an announcement that Wednesday—an announcement that did not materialize.
The prospects for a near-term deal appeared to dim further over the weekend after the United Arab Emirates said Iran had launched a missile attack on one of its ships, according to the Journal. Washington has said it will not accept Iranian restrictions on U.S. warships transiting the strait or Iranian tolling of commercial vessels, U.S. officials said, positions that remain far apart from Tehran’s stated conditions.
Money remains one of the central obstacles to any resolution. Iran is seeking billions of dollars in war reparations along with the unfreezing of its assets held around the world. Trump has said the White House will not allow taxpayer money to flow to Iran, though officials acknowledge a deal is unlikely without some unfreezing of assets, potentially with conditions attached. A related dispute concerns whether the U.S. should reissue waivers allowing Iran to sell oil on the open market, an arrangement Washington had agreed to last June as part of an earlier interim peace deal that collapsed after Iran attacked ships in the strait.
On the nuclear question, Trump has told aides privately that he believes Iran is unlikely to be able to revive its nuclear program during his presidency after the U.S. destroyed three primary nuclear sites last year, officials said. Speaking at NATO’s summit in July, Trump suggested Iran’s buried uranium stockpile posed little threat. “We’ve already got the nuclear material, because it’s so far underground,” he said. “Nobody’s going to be able to get it except us.”
Should the U.S. succeed in keeping Iran’s nuclear program contained and traffic resume through the strait, officials said Trump is more likely to extend the current ceasefire indefinitely and lift the American military blockade on Iranian ports. A White House official said the U.S. has already completed all of its military objectives against Iran and that Trump’s focus is now squarely on securing the flow of global energy through the strait, while keeping military options available should Iran target additional ships.
The broader toll of the five-month standoff has been steep. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has produced a global fuel-price shock, a U.S.-led aerial campaign against Iranian targets, an American naval blockade of Iran and an escort operation for commercial shipping, according to figures compiled by Wikipedia. At least one tugboat has been sunk, more than a dozen merchant ships damaged, two vessels captured, and a dozen seafarers killed or reported missing since the crisis began.
For now, U.S. officials say Trump remains prepared to wait out the latest breakdown in talks, calculating that time—and stable gas prices—are on his side. But the gap between Tehran’s escalating list of demands and Washington’s redlines suggests any declaration of victory, whenever it comes, may look considerably different from the total denuclearization Trump promised at the war’s outset.