President Donald Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo Wednesday that the U.S.-Iran war is “very close to being over”—even as negotiations haven’t restarted and the U.S. and Iranian naval forces stare hard at each other across a blocked Strait of Hormuz.
“I think it’s close to over, yeah. I view it as very close to being over,” Trump told Bartiromo in an interview on Mornings with Maria.
Trump has a reason to be upbeat; the stock market is near an all-time-high, ready to rally hard in celebration of a ceasefire. Yet there is a problem, namely, facts on the ground: The U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports is in its third day, Iran’s military warned it would shut down all Persian Gulf shipping if the blockade continues, and Brent crude is still trading near $96 a barrel—about 33% above pre-war levels.
JD Vance, who led the U.S. delegation in Islamabad over the weekend, offered a notably less conclusive read of the situation Monday. “The ball is very much in their court,” Vance said. “The Iranians are going to determine what happens next.”
According to the Associated Press, the two sides have an “in principle agreement” to pursue further talks, with mediators pushing to resolve Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program before Trump’s April 7 truce formally expires next week.
Trump acknowledged the U.S. “is not finished” while simultaneously predicting a deal. “I think they want to make a deal very badly,” he told Bartiromo.
Blockade update
The blockade was “fully implemented” on Tuesday, CENTCOM wrote on X Wednesday morning, after military officials announced that they forced six merchant vessels departing from an Iranian port to turn back.
“In less than 36 hours … U.S. forces have completely halted economic trade going into and out of Iran by sea,” the statement said.
Gregory Brew, a senior oil analyst at Eurasia Group, said it is “so far, a bit hard to determine precisely how aggressively the U.S. intends to enforce this blockade.”
“Some tankers have been turned back. Some are holding their positions inside the strait,” Brew wrote on X. “But traffic in and out of Iranian ports has not halted.”
Regardless of the actual movement in the port, Iran’s response came soon after. Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi warned that if “the aggressive and terrorist U.S.” continues the blockade and “creates insecurity for Iranian commercial ships and oil tankers,” Iran’s armed forces “will not allow any kind of export and import to continue in the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman and the Red Sea.”
While the military plays bad cop, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told the Iranian semi-official news agency ISNA that Tehran does not want war or conflict, and has always sought stability.
However, he added that he “will not be forced to surrender. Any attempt to impose will or force Iran to surrender is doomed to failure, and the people will never accept such an approach.”
The talks in Pakistan
The core ask at the heart of negotiations—that Iran permanently surrender its nuclear enrichment program—is one that Tehran has refused for decades, even through sanctions, assassinations of its scientists, and now, a seven-week bombing campaign that killed its Ayatollah and, as Trump said, many of the other candidates to take over the government.
So Vance, according to the New York Times, brought a softer version to Islamabad, a proposal for a two-decade moratorium on uranium enrichment. Iran reportedly countered up to five years. Trump, back in Washington, told the New York Post that even the deal Vance brought was unacceptable.
“I’ve been saying they can’t have nuclear weapons,” he said, according to the Post, “so I don’t like the 20 years.”