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President Donald Trump met Monday with his top national security advisors to discuss an Iranian proposal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the White House confirmed, even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested the offer falls well short of American demands.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt confirmed the meeting after it was first reported by Axios, saying the Iranian proposal "was being discussed" but declining to say whether Trump would accept it. The reported plan would see both Iran and the United States lift their respective blockades on the critical waterway ahead of further talks on Tehran's nuclear program.
The confirmation came with notable caveats. Leavitt stressed that "the president's red lines with respect to Iran have been made very, very clear, not just to the American public, but also to them as well." ABC News, citing two anonymous American officials, separately reported that the deal fell short of those red lines.
Rubio was more pointed in his criticism, suggesting in a Fox News interview that Tehran's definition of an "open" strait is fundamentally incompatible with Washington's position. "If what they mean by opening the straits is, 'yes, the straits are open as long as you coordinate with Iran, get our permission or we'll blow you up and you pay us,' that's not opening the straits," he said.
The secretary of state framed the issue in broader terms, warning that the United States could not allow Iran to establish what he described as a system of effective toll collection over an international waterway. "They cannot normalize, nor can we tolerate them trying to normalize, a system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway, and how much you have to pay them to use it," Rubio said.
The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow chokepoint between Iran and Oman at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, is among the most strategically consequential waterways in the world. Roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas normally transits through it, making any sustained disruption a potential shock to international energy markets.
Iran has periodically threatened to close the strait during past periods of heightened tension with Western powers, though it has historically stopped short of doing so. The current standoff, unfolding against the backdrop of broader conflict and stalled nuclear negotiations, represents one of the most acute tests of that dynamic in recent years.
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The Iranian proposal, as reported by Axios, would also postpone nuclear negotiations to a later stage, effectively decoupling the Hormuz question from the more complex issue of Tehran's atomic program, at least temporarily. That sequencing appears to be a sticking point for Washington, which has consistently sought to address Iran's nuclear activities as part of any broader diplomatic settlement.
Leavitt declined to elaborate on specifics, saying only that Trump had met with his national security team and that the proposal remained under discussion. Whether the administration ultimately accepts, rejects, or counters the Iranian offer is expected to become clearer in the coming days.
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