Trump raises the stakes, again
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he turned down a new ceasefire request from Iran’s president and warned that Tehran could be bombed “back to the Stone Ages” unless ships are allowed to move freely through the Strait of Hormuz.
Posting on Truth Social, Trump referred to “Iran’s New Regime President,” whom he described as “much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors.” He said that leader had asked for a U.S. ceasefire.
“We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free, and clear. Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages,” Trump wrote.
The identity of the Iranian official Trump was referring to was not clear. Masoud Pezeshkian has been Iran’s president since 2024, and Tehran has denied reports that he was killed in the joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes that began more than a month ago.
Tehran says there is no negotiation
Trump has spent recent days saying he is in touch with unnamed Iranian leaders. Iran, naturally, says that is not the same thing as diplomacy.
On Wednesday, Iranian state television said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called Trump’s claim of a ceasefire request “false and baseless.” Araghchi told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that some indirect messages have passed through third-party intermediaries and said he continues to hear from Trump’s peace envoy, Steve Witkoff.
But he rejected the idea that those contacts amount to negotiations.
“I receive messages from [US special envoy Steve] Witkoff directly, as before, and this does not mean that we are in negotiations,” Araghchi said.
“There is no truth to the claim of negotiations with any party in Iran. All messages are conveyed through the Foreign Ministry or received by it, and there are communications between security agencies.”
Araghchi also said the “trust level is at zero” after two rounds of diplomacy with Witkoff over the last year, both of which ended with U.S. airstrikes on Iranian targets.
“We do not have any faith that negotiations with the US will yield any results ... we don’t see honesty,” he added.
Hormuz remains the flash point
Trump’s claim about rejecting a ceasefire came just hours before he was due to deliver a primetime address on the war, after failing to assemble an international force capable of reopening and securing the Strait of Hormuz.
That narrow waterway between Iran and Oman handles about one fifth of the world’s energy supply, which explains why everybody suddenly cares so much about maritime freedom. The strait has become the center of the conflict since Iran began attacking cargo ships there after declaring it closed to maritime traffic linked to the U.S. or Israel.
Trump’s post also landed at 8:44 a.m. ET, about 45 minutes before U.S. financial markets opened, which did not exactly help calm anyone.
Global markets have been rattled by the month-old air war, in large part because Iran’s effective control of the strait threatens energy shipments and trade flows.
Allies are being asked to do the heavy lifting
Trump had earlier promised American naval vessels would escort ships through the waterway, but that never materialized. Instead, he has repeatedly pressed European allies to contribute ships and help reopen the strait.
Some allies, including the U.K. and France, have said they are interested in a multinational force to protect navigation. But European leaders, including British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, have said such an operation could not begin until the U.S. and Israel stop the war.
Trump, meanwhile, has kept attacking NATO members for not joining the effort, even though he made no public attempt to rally international backing before launching the airstrikes.
He has called the alliance a “paper tiger” and said its failure to follow his demands shows it is one-sided, despite NATO’s only invocation of the mutual defense clause being in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
On Wednesday, Trump told The Telegraph that pulling the U.S. out of NATO was now “beyond reconsideration.” He also said he would use his evening remarks to express “disgust” with the alliance and said he was “absolutely” weighing withdrawal, despite U.S. law barring a president from leaving NATO without Congress.
More targets, less clarity
In separate comments to Reuters, Trump said the U.S. still has “some more targets left” before the war ends. He also said Iran “won't have a nuclear weapon because they are incapable of that now.”
“And then I'll leave, and I'll take everybody with me, and if we have to we'll come back to do spot hits,” he said.
Trump added that he “does not care about nuclear material” and said the U.S. would be out of Iran “pretty quickly,” suggesting the military campaign in the region may soon wind down. That would appear to leave little room for the ground invasion some people have apparently learned to fear from the internet rather than from the reporting.
