U.S. President Donald Trump said the next 48 hours would determine the fate of negotiations with Iran, warning that Tehran would be attacked severely if it abandoned the talks or refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“Where are we on Iran?” a reporter asked Trump. “We’ll know in 48 hours,” the president replied.
Trump, who declared two days ago that the strait should have reopened by Tuesday, repeated his threat in an interview with Fox News.
“The strait is going to be open very soon, or they are going to get hit very hard and the strait is going to be open,” he said.
Trump added that if Iran withdrew from the negotiations, whose existence Tehran denies, “they are going to get hit very hard, and they understand.”
Iran continues to insist that any agreement must leave it in control of the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal that Washington expects an arrangement similar to the earlier memorandum of understanding: first a ceasefire, including the reopening of Hormuz, and then negotiations over more contentious issues such as Iran’s nuclear program.
Trump appeared increasingly frustrated by Tehran’s public denials that it was communicating with Washington.
“They called me and said very politely, ‘Please, can we talk?’ And I said, ‘Yes, let’s get this finished,’” Trump said.
“It’s a little embarrassing. You say we’re having great talks, and then somebody in Iran says, ‘We never met.’ That’s a lie. ‘We didn’t talk about nuclear.’ So what did we talk about? Sitting around and waiting?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he added. “What matters is the action, and if they don’t make a deal, it will be too bad.”
Renewed fighting could pose serious defensive challenges for the United States. CNN reported that the U.S. military used nearly 80% of its THAAD interceptor missiles during the war with Iran.
The system, designed to intercept ballistic missiles, was also used to shoot down numerous missiles over Israel. Sources familiar with the matter told CNN that senior commanders had warned the Pentagon that its ammunition stocks were “dangerously low.”
The United States reportedly has only about half the number of Patriot interceptors it possessed at the beginning of the war.
Regional officials told The Associated Press that any agreement to reopen Hormuz would also require the removal of the current U.S. blockade on Iranian ports.
Washington could oppose such an arrangement and effectively prevent it from going ahead if its terms granted Iran control over shipping through the strait. The negotiations are formally taking place between Iran and Oman, rather than Iran and the United States.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington had rejected Iran’s demand to charge ships passing through the waterway. It remained unclear what the U.S. rejection meant for the prospects of reaching an agreement.
Senior regional officials said the United States and other governments in the region were also seeking guarantees that Iran and its proxies would not threaten their territory.
The dispute over how the Strait of Hormuz should be reopened was the main reason the memorandum of understanding reached by Iran and the United States in June collapsed.
Under normal conditions, about one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas consumption passed through the strait. Until the war against Iran began in late February, tankers and other vessels traveled freely through the internationally recognized shipping route.
Iran carried out its longstanding threat to block the waterway as soon as the war began, attacking ships with drones and missiles launched from its territory.
(Photo: Hamed Jafarnejad/ISNA/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS, AP/Alex Brandon, REUTERS/Stringer)
The disruption sent oil prices soaring and placed heavy pressure on Trump to stop the fighting, partly because of the effect rising energy prices could have on American voters ahead of the November congressional midterm elections.
Iran now claims authority over Hormuz. During negotiations over the June memorandum, Tehran demanded that every vessel passing through the strait pay it a transit fee.
To bypass the dispute, the memorandum was deliberately written in ambiguous terms. It called for the strait to reopen temporarily for 60 days without mandatory payments while Iran and Oman negotiated its future administration.
The agreement collapsed when Iran continued attacking vessels traveling through the southern shipping route, which lies closer to Oman. Muscat does not demand payments from ships using the route.
Negotiations between Iran and Oman over the future of Hormuz continued alongside the renewed exchanges of fire between Tehran and Washington, which have since stopped again.
In recent weeks, Iran rejected an Omani proposal under which payments for passage through the strait would be voluntary rather than mandatory.
Tehran now views Hormuz as a crucial source of strategic leverage that it cannot afford to surrender, while Washington insists that Iran must not be allowed to control an international waterway.