President Trump convened his Cabinet on Wednesday to assess the state of negotiations with Iran, projecting confidence that a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is within reach — while making clear he will resume military operations if terms he considers satisfactory cannot be secured.
President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet at the White House on Wednesday morning at what his own officials have described as a precarious moment for diplomacy. Nearly three months after the United States and Israel launched strikes that began the Iran war, and seven weeks after a ceasefire was agreed in Islamabad, the two sides remain short of a final settlement — and a five-day pause on US threats to strike Iranian power plants is counting down.
Trump is projecting confidence that he is closing in on a deal that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and provide him a credible argument that Iran’s nuclear capability has been diminished enough to declare victory, winding down a conflict that has been politically unpopular for Republicans.
But his words at the Cabinet meeting carried an unmistakable edge. “Iran is negotiating on fumes and they want very much to make a deal,” Trump told reporters. “So far, they haven’t gotten there, we’re not satisfied with it, but we will be. Either that or we’ll have to just finish the job. Their navy is gone, as I’ve said a thousand times, their navy is gone, their air force is gone, everything’s gone.”
The State of Negotiations
The talks to end the war have proceeded on multiple tracks simultaneously — and the tracks are not always moving in the same direction.
A senior Iranian official said on Wednesday that Iran and the United States have not yet reached an agreement on unblocking the strait. “Iran and Oman are negotiating a new procedure for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” said Ali Bagheri, deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. That statement — confirming active negotiations between Iran and Oman on transit procedures — represents a meaningful development: it indicates that the mechanism for reopening the waterway is under active discussion, even if no final agreement exists.
The financial architecture of a potential deal is also becoming clearer. Iranian negotiators in Doha on Monday pressed hard on the question of frozen assets. If Tehran and Washington agree to the proposed deal, $24 billion worth of Iranian assets could be released, according to Iranian sources. But a senior US administration official said the unfreezing of Iranian assets will occur only once the Strait of Hormuz has reopened. The sequencing question — who moves first — remains one of the central sticking points.
The emerging deal puts off many critical issues to be resolved later and has already exposed the Republican president to fierce criticism — even from some of his own supporters — that Iran’s hard-line leaders will use any agreement to reconstitute their military capabilities.
A Divided Administration
Behind the public confidence lies a significant internal debate. According to reporting from Axios, all of Trump’s senior national security and foreign policy officials participated in a situation room meeting on Tuesday to discuss the US position in the next round of talks planned for Saturday.
The internal divisions are substantive. Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff believe diplomacy could produce a nuclear deal and are prepared to make some concessions to get there. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz are described as highly sceptical of the Iranian side’s intentions and favour a maximalist approach to negotiations.
Trump himself sits at the centre of that debate, receiving competing advice and sending signals that at different moments emphasise either the deal he wants or the military option he is keeping open.
Trump dismissed concerns about the war’s political toll at home, saying: “They thought they were going to outwait me, you know? We’ll outwait him, he’s got the midterms. I don’t care about the midterms.”
The midterm reference is significant. Iran’s strategy — if it has one — has been to stretch out negotiations in the hope that domestic US political pressure forces Washington to accept less favourable terms. Trump’s statement is a direct counter to that calculation: he is signalling that he is not constrained by the November 2026 midterm elections in the way Tehran may have assumed.
The Power Plant Deadline
One of the most acute pressure points in the current moment is a deadline Trump set for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on Iranian power plants.
Trump extended his deadline for Iran to reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz to international shipping on Monday, saying the US would hold off on threatened strikes against Iranian power plants for five days. That five-day window is now running. Its expiry, without a deal or a further extension, would create a new decision point for both sides — with severe humanitarian consequences for Iranian civilians if power infrastructure is struck.
Iranian officials have rejected the threat as blackmail and stated that no legitimate negotiation can proceed under ultimatums. At the same time, Iran’s continued mine-laying activity in the strait — which triggered US defensive strikes on Monday — has made it difficult for the ceasefire to hold in any meaningful operational sense.
What Iran Wants — and What It Needs
Iran’s negotiating position has been shaped by both strategic calculation and acute economic pressure.
Strategically, Iran’s primary leverage remains the Strait of Hormuz. As long as the waterway stays closed, Iran has something to trade. Any deal that reopens the strait without adequate security guarantees, financial compensation, and some form of nuclear programme preservation would be presented domestically as a defeat by the hardline factions that now have significant influence over Iran’s post-Khamenei political direction.
Economically, the pressure is severe. The US naval blockade has been estimated at costing Iran $500 million per day in lost revenues. Inflation inside Iran has accelerated. The restoration of internet access this week — a decision with domestic political dimensions — suggests the Pezeshkian administration is managing a population that has endured significant hardship and needs to see a credible path toward normalcy.
Rubio told reporters that talks with Iran on reopening the strait and extending the ceasefire will take several more days, saying: “He’s either going to make a good deal or no deal.”
The Nuclear Question
Underlying the immediate Hormuz dispute is the issue that drove the original US-Israeli strikes: Iran’s nuclear programme. The strikes in February degraded significant elements of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but the full extent of the damage remains disputed and is not publicly confirmed.
The emerging deal framework does not fully resolve the nuclear question. It addresses the immediate Hormuz crisis and provides for a time-limited negotiation on nuclear matters thereafter. For critics of the deal inside the administration — and among Republican hawks outside it — that deferral is a fundamental flaw, arguing that any agreement that leaves Iran’s nuclear ambitions unaddressed simply restarts the clock on a problem that has not been eliminated.
Rubio said the US intended to engage in “a very real, significant, time-limited negotiation on the nuclear matter” as part of any broader resolution. What that negotiation looks like in practice — and whether Iran’s new leadership would engage seriously with it — is a question for a later phase of diplomacy that first requires the immediate crisis to be resolved.
What Happens Next
Saturday has been identified as the next planned round of formal talks. In the days between Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting and those talks, several things need to happen for the diplomatic process to stay on track: the five-day deadline needs to be extended or resolved; the IRGC’s threatened retaliation for Monday’s strikes needs to remain rhetorical rather than operational; and both sides need to maintain the back-channel communications that have produced whatever progress exists.
The Pentagon is feeling a financial squeeze and is struggling in some cases to carry out routine training and maintenance amid its ongoing operations against Iran. That constraint is not yet decisive — the US military’s operational capacity remains enormous — but it adds a further dimension of urgency to reaching a resolution.
The world is watching one of the most consequential diplomatic negotiations of the decade play out in real time. Whether the outcome is a deal that reopens the Strait of Hormuz and begins the process of ending the war, or a resumption of full-scale conflict with all that entails for the global economy and regional stability, will be determined in the coming days.
LoudFact.com is an independent global news and explainer platform. This report is based on reporting from the Washington Post, NPR, CBS News, CNN, and Axios as of May 27, 2026.
