Trump administration claims Hormuz deal is close as Iran denies negotiations

Washington post-Aug 4th2026

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday that a deal could be reached with Iran “today or tomorrow” to open the Strait of Hormuz to “freedom of movement.”

“We are in talks with the Iranians,” Bessent told CNBC, echoing President Donald Trump’s Monday statement that talks were “going on right now.” Those assertions have sent world oil prices down and the U.S. stock market up, even as they were quickly denied by Tehran.

“We are not currently holding negotiations with the United States,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said Monday in response to Trump’s statement. There was no indication from Tehran that its position had changed overnight.

Meanwhile, an unidentified cargo ship reported it had been “hit by an unknown projectile” early Tuesday morning, 23 miles from the Omani coast in the strait, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center said.

It was far from the first time since the war began on Feb. 28 that the two sides have offered differing versions of reality on damage done by their dueling airstrikes, what they have agreed to in on-again-off-again informal talks, or even whether those talks were happening

In a social media post Monday, the president called Iranian leaders “unbelievably duplicitous,” telling reporters in the Oval Office that “we’re straight about” talks between the two countries, though “they deny. But they’re not denying it now. They just put out a statement, not denying it.”

Asked where that statement could be found, a White House spokesperson referred The Washington Post back to the president’s remarks.

Trump said Iran, along with other regional states, had “begged” for talks, leading him to call off what he had described as an imminent U.S. attack that would have been “harder than any attack … since World War II.”

“We were going to hit them very hard” over last weekend, Trump said. But “I want to give them every last chance before decapitation. It’s very tough to do what we have planned, still planned,” he said. “I’m very proud of the fact that I will give people a chance.”

The conflict, which Trump originally predicted would last only a few weeks but is now entering in its sixth month, has dragged down his poll numbers. Growing numbers of Republican lawmakers and voters have questioned both the rationale for the war and Trump’s strategy.

Although Trump went into the war saying his goal was to destroy Tehran’s nuclear program — an objective he previously said was achieved after 12 days of U.S. and Israeli bombing last summer — Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz within days after the conflict began quickly became the focus of administration attention. The narrow waterway is a chokepoint, bordered by Iran and Oman in the Persian Gulf, through which at least 20 percent of the world’s energy supplies transit.