Trump tempers Iran deal expectations as nuclear talks extend beyond immediate timeline

Donald Trump pumped the brakes on Sunday. After weeks of fighting that had already killed thousands across the Middle East, after a ceasefire between Iran and the United States had held since April 8th, the American president wanted his negotiators to understand one thing: there was no need to rush. "I have instructed my representatives not to hurry," he wrote on Truth Social, "because time is working in our favor." The port blockades around Iran would stay locked down, he added, until Tehran signed a final agreement.

But the gap between what Trump was saying and what his own officials were hinting at told a different story. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking from New Delhi, suggested the world might hear "good news" within hours. A senior White House official told Axios the same day that no deal would come on Sunday—that any announcement could take days, maybe longer, because it required sign-off from Iranian authorities all the way up to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. The two statements sat uneasily next to each other, like a negotiation being conducted in two different languages.

What was actually on the table, according to reporting from CBS News and the Wall Street Journal, was narrower than it sounded. The proposal being discussed would unfreeze some Iranian assets held in foreign banks and extend the talks by thirty days. It would not, however, touch the nuclear question. That was being deferred—pushed into a later phase of negotiations that hadn't even begun. Rubio told the New York Times that nuclear issues were simply too technical to resolve in seventy-two hours. "You cannot solve a nuclear matter in 72 hours on the back of a napkin," he said. The Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei, confirmed this: they were finalizing a memorandum of understanding, but it did not constitute "an agreement on the main issues." The nuclear program, he said, was not part of "this stage."

This phased approach had backing from seven or eight countries in the region, Rubio noted. But it infuriated Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister declared on Sunday that he and Trump had agreed any final deal must eliminate what he called "the nuclear threat"—which meant dismantling Iran's uranium enrichment facilities and removing enriched material from Iranian territory. Netanyahu had spoken with Trump by phone the night before. The message was clear: Israel was not interested in a temporary pause on the nuclear question. It wanted it resolved, and it wanted it resolved in a way that left Iran without the capacity to build weapons.

Meanwhile, the ceasefire itself was fraying at the edges. On the Lebanese front, the Israeli military ordered evacuations from a dozen towns in the south and east before launching a series of strikes against Hezbollah positions, despite the truce that had been in place since April 17th. An Israeli airstrike the day before had killed eleven people in southern Lebanon, including six women and a child. Hezbollah's leader, Naim Qasem, said he hoped the Iran-U.S. agreement would extend to Lebanon—that it would include a full ceasefire there as well. But he also made clear that disarming his group was not negotiable. "Disarmament means annihilation," he said. Rubio responded by calling Hezbollah's rhetoric irresponsible and warning that "the era in which a terrorist group held an entire country hostage is coming to an end."

Back in Iran, the waiting was wearing on people. A 39-year-old woman named Shahrzad, reached by phone from Paris, captured the exhaustion: "The state of neither war nor peace is worse than war itself." Three months of conflict, thousands dead, the economy shaken. And now a negotiation that everyone said was close but that no one could quite close. Trump wanted time on his side. But for the people caught between the negotiating table and the next airstrike, time felt like something else entirely.