President Trump says the United States is "low keying it" with Iran, banking on a naval blockade and collapsing oil revenues to force Tehran's hand, even as hardliners inside the Iranian regime pile on new demands designed to stall a deal.
In a phone interview published Sunday, Trump described a deliberate strategy of patience over escalation. Rather than resuming the large-scale military strikes he had considered as recently as a week earlier, the president said he is content to let Iran's deepening financial crisis do the work. U.S. officials told Newsmax that Trump had been leaning toward restarting major combat operations roughly a week before the interview but was persuaded to hold off, a decision that now appears to define the administration's near-term posture.
"We are low keying it," Trump said. "We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money."
He pointed to crude oil prices, which have fallen to slightly more than $75 a barrel, a steep drop that cuts directly into the revenues Tehran needs to fund its military and its network of proxy forces across the Middle East. At their peak in March and April, oil prices topped $118 a barrel. That collapse, combined with a U.S. naval blockade and broad sanctions, has left Iran struggling to pay its own troops.
Trump brushed aside concerns about the pace of diplomacy. "It will work out. It always works out. It's like a chess game," he said.
The economic picture inside Iran supports the president's bet. Since the conflict began in February, Iranian grocery prices have exploded. Bread is up 140 percent. Dairy has climbed nearly 117 percent. Overall food and drink prices have surged more than 113 percent, the New York Post reported, citing data on the country's consumer costs. The Iranian rial has plummeted alongside them.
One U.S. official argued that active warfare had actually given Iran's leadership political cover, allowing the regime to rally nationalist sentiment and avoid confronting the economic catastrophe building beneath it. By stepping back from the battlefield, the logic goes, Washington strips that cover away and forces the regime's internal factions to fight each other instead of the United States.
That internal fracture is already visible. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian leads a faction deeply concerned about economic collapse and convinced Tehran needs an agreement with Washington. On the other side, IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi leads hardliners who oppose any concessions. A diplomat from one of the mediating countries said the split is real and growing.
The friction came into sharp focus over the past week. Qatari and Pakistani mediators had been confident that an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which much of the world's oil supply passes, would be announced last Wednesday. The deal, negotiated in Oman between Iran and the United States, would have given Tehran partial control over traffic through the strait, authority Iran did not hold before the war.
Those prospects faded fast. On Saturday, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, issued a sweeping new list of demands that went far beyond the Oman terms. The administration had previously warned Iran that current talks were its "last chance" after months of collapsed ceasefires, and Zolghadr's move looked like a direct rejection of that warning.
His demands read less like a negotiating position and more like a wish list drafted by people who have no intention of reaching a deal. Zolghadr insisted the United States must never "threaten nor insult Iran in any language," must "permanently end the war against Iran and Iran's allies in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and Iraq," lift the naval blockade, withdraw military forces from areas surrounding Iran, compensate Tehran for war damages, lift all sanctions, and release frozen Iranian funds.
Several of those conditions, particularly the demand for a permanent end to hostilities against Iranian proxies across four countries and the lifting of all sanctions, had previously been presented as conditions for a nuclear agreement. Tehran is now demanding them merely to reopen a shipping lane. The escalation in price is unmistakable.
Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed that the demands have been formally transmitted to Washington. A separate deal with Oman defining new shipping lanes through the strait is reportedly in its final stages, but Iran insists the waterway stays closed until the United States meets its broader conditions, Fox News reported.
Despite Iran's insistence that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil is flowing. A U.S. official said roughly eight million barrels of crude leave the Persian Gulf each night through the strait's southern lane, moving in coordination with the U.S. military. Washington intends to increase those flows as much as possible while negotiations remain unresolved.
That fact undercuts Iran's leverage. Tehran claims the strait is shut, but the oil keeps moving, protected by American warships. The regime's ability to use the waterway as a bargaining chip depends on a threat it can no longer fully execute.
Vice President JD Vance reinforced the administration's posture in a Saturday statement to Fox News. He framed the situation as a multiphase effort far from finished but well underway. Trump had earlier called off a planned strike after Tehran asked for more time, a decision that signaled willingness to let diplomacy play out, on American terms.
Vance told Fox News:
"This thing is not over. It's obviously not at the beginning. We're in the middle of the game, and we're applying a whole host of tools, diplomatic, economic, military tools, to ensure that we get the best outcome for the American people."
In a separate comment, Vance added a pointed line about how the administration evaluates Iranian intentions: "We don't trust. We verify. We actually look not at people's words but people's deeds," Breitbart reported.
The regime's internal power struggle took a concrete step in the hardliners' direction with a significant leadership change. Mohsen Rezaei, a former IRGC commander wanted by Interpol in connection with the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, was named secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. The appointment puts a man with a long record of confrontation, and an international arrest warrant, at the center of Iran's security decision-making.
That move matters because the Supreme National Security Council is the body issuing the demands that have stalled the Strait of Hormuz deal. Installing Rezaei signals the hardline wing is consolidating influence at exactly the moment the economic faction is arguing most urgently for compromise. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have held the line on the president's war powers by a single vote, preserving the administration's flexibility to act if diplomacy collapses entirely.
Trump has privately floated the idea of declaring victory in the conflict even without a new nuclear agreement, provided Iran's nuclear program remains contained and the Strait of Hormuz fully reopens. That scenario would let the administration claim success on the two issues most visible to the American public while sidestepping the broader, more intractable questions about Iran's proxy network and long-term nuclear ambitions.
Vice President Vance has acknowledged the difficulty of the endgame. He has described resolving the standoff as "messy" while pledging that Tehran will never acquire a nuclear weapon, a commitment that leaves room for a wide range of outcomes short of a comprehensive deal.
The administration's bet rests on a straightforward calculation: Iran's economy is deteriorating faster than its leaders can sustain politically. Bread prices doubling, a currency in freefall, damaged infrastructure from months of conflict, and no revenue stream large enough to reverse the slide, all of it compounds every week the blockade holds.
The risk is that Iran's hardliners use the economic pain to consolidate power rather than to seek compromise. Zolghadr's demands, Rezaei's appointment, and the IRGC's refusal to concede all point in that direction. If the faction that wants no deal wins the internal argument, the United States may find itself right back where Trump was a week ago, weighing whether to resume combat operations against a regime that has decided suffering is preferable to surrender.
For now, the president is content to wait. The oil is flowing, the sanctions are biting, and the regime is arguing with itself. That is not a resolution. But it is leverage, and leverage is what wins chess games.
