DUBAI — The offer has not been withdrawn. Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told Iranian media outlets on Sunday that Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days is still on the table, according to Reuters.
He said it in Baghdad. Araqchi had gone there for a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and it was to Iranian reporters that he made the point.
“Our situation is clear and based on the seven-days proposal presented to the US. They shared comments which we are reviewing, but our proposal is still on the table and if there is any honesty on the US part, which there isn’t, the way to reopening the Strait of Hormuz is obvious,”
None of it comes free. Tehran lists seven conditions, and the reporting names three: the US blockade of Iranian ports lifted, sanctions on oil exports lifted, and fighting stopped on all regional fronts at once.
Do that, Araqchi argued, and the waterway reopens in six days, with negotiations resuming on day seven.
There has already been one exchange. Washington replied to the September proposal, Tehran acknowledged the reply, and by last week Iran’s security chief was saying publicly that the conditions had simply been left unaddressed. That, he said, is why nothing has moved.
Underneath the argument about sequencing sits the nuclear file, which Washington refuses to postpone. Addressing Iran’s programme from the outset is, for the US side, the starting point — Reuters called the clash a central point of disagreement.
JD Vance spelled out the American demand earlier this month, and it was not a small one: a “meaningful” reduction in the amount of uranium Iran can enrich, as part of settling a war that has now run for eight months.
Tehran will not accept talks built that way round. Its order is strait first — ships moving, the channel secured — and broader negotiations only after that.
The proposal has been sitting there since mid-September, when it followed the collapse of an interim ceasefire. What is at stake is a channel that, before the war, handled roughly a fifth of all oil and liquefied natural gas traded worldwide.
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