Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said his country would wait for mediators to communicate the U.S. response to its latest cease-fire proposal before abandoning efforts to restart talks about the plan, despite President Trump’s public rejection of it.
Mr. Trump told reporters on Saturday that the proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route in the Persian Gulf, and restart talks about Iran’s nuclear program within seven days “would not be acceptable,” although he signaled he was open to negotiations.
Mr. Araghchi, who is still in New York after last week’s annual U.N. General Assembly, brushed off the Mr. Trump’s rebuff as typical of the president’s conflicting messaging.
“The U.S. President has said some good things as well as many contradictory things, which unfortunately we hear from him quite often,” the foreign minister said in a statement on social media on Saturday. “We are waiting for the definitive views to be conveyed to us through the intermediaries, and we will make a decision on that basis.”
Mr. Araghchi said Mr. Trump’s comments were only a “first reaction” to Iran’s latest proposal, which was conveyed on the sidelines of the General Assembly. The new plan is similar to the so-called memorandum of understanding that the countries agreed to in June but under an accelerated timeline to cease hostilities.
Iranian officials understand that Mr. Trump is the final decision maker on any deal, especially as the president has torpedoed previous proposals agreed to by his own negotiators, according to one mediator who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks. But the person said that the Iranians also suspected that the president might be speaking more harshly in public to the news media, while taking a different view in private. The Iranians were still waiting for U.S. officials to provide a “translation” of Mr. Trump’s actual position, the mediator added.
The Iranians likely hope that last-minute negotiations while Mr. Araghchi is still in New York could prove fruitful, said Kamran Karami, a Tehran-based researcher for the Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, a research group.
“Iran may still be hoping that over the next few days, through a back-and-forth exchange of views, there may be some softening in this process,” he said. “Keeping the channel with the mediators open allows Iran not to completely close off the diplomatic path.”
The mediator, however, said that deep mistrust between Washington and Tehran made any comprehensive talks unlikely right now. He added that negotiators were exploring a narrower agreement to ease the Iranian and U.S. naval blockades.
Mr. Trump has often oscillated dramatically between positions since the beginning of the war in February, sometimes in the same speech. In his address to the General Assembly last week, he suggested that the United States could agree a deal with Iran that would make the country “one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world” but quickly added that his other option was to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly.”
Ever since the United States and Israel attacked in February, Iran has used its ability to throttle shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit point for oil and gas, to send energy prices soaring and disrupt the global economy. The country’s leaders have seen their effective blockade of the waterway as a key source of leverage in negotiations with the United States, and they have repeatedly refused to make any concessions on Iran’s nuclear program ahead of negotiations.
The United States has imposed a naval blockade and tougher sanctions on Iran in retaliation, putting the country under severe economic pressure.
Yet Mr. Araghchi told reporters last week that Iran would not back down on its main conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. He said that Iran’s demands included the release of roughly $12 billion in frozen assets, the lifting of sanctions on Iranian oil sales, and the end of the U.S. naval blockade.
Iran secured those conditions in the memorandum of understanding that was signed on June 17. But that deal collapsed within weeks when Iranian forces fired on vessels they said were being surreptitiously guided through the strait by U.S. forces.
Iran’s enemies have tried to force more the country to make more concessions through military and economic pressure, Mr. Araghchi said in his social media post on Saturday, but he said that diplomacy was the only solution.
“There will be no way forward, other than a negotiated solution based on honor and justice,” he said.
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.
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