Trump: Iran’s seven-day Hormuz deal ‘would not be acceptable’
Before speaking to reporters, the US president had posted on Truth Social an image of the strait labelled “Trump Strait”.
US President Donald Trump has rejected Iran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days, telling reporters at the White House that the deal “would not be acceptable”.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, set out the plan at the UN in New York on 25 September.
Trump spoke on the South Lawn on 26 September, before leaving for a college football game in Tennessee, and said Iran wanted a deal to open the strait immediately because it was “losing so badly”.
The US, Trump said, was winning and had total control of the waterway, with large amounts of oil coming out of the strait.
It was “fine” that Iran wanted a deal, the US president added – just not this one.
Before Trump spoke, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian had told CBS News, in an interview recorded on 25 September, that the process would “begin from the very day” the US accepted the plan.
Pezeshkian said the US had blocked Iran’s way and Iran had, in turn, blocked the way from its side, and that both needed to open up before other issues could be discussed.
At the UN General Assembly on 26 September, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, called for the strait to return to its state before 28 February, when the war began.
There should be no fees or restrictions, Prince Faisal added, and no party should use vital waterways as “an instrument of pressure, threat or harm to the interests of States”.
What happened before
Araghchi said Iran had sent the plan to Washington through Qatar, and that reopening the strait within seven days depended on the necessary conditions being met.
The steps the US needed to take were not new, Araghchi added, and were all already in a memorandum of understanding (MOU) the two countries signed in June.
Pezeshkian said the earlier process under the MOU had been interrupted by a “lack of coordination”, and that its requests had now been “broken down into stages”.
Asked whether Iran’s military would abide by a deal if Trump accepted the proposal, Pezeshkian said: “Obviously, we will abide by whatever we commit to.”