Iran's Pezeshkian Defies Trump at UN While Signaling Openness to Talks

Masoud Pezeshkian stood before the United Nations General Assembly in New York and flipped the script. The Iranian president, speaking for the first time since the US and Israel launched what he called an all-out war on his country, accused Washington of being the true bully and terrorist in the Middle East. He held up photographs of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader who was assassinated at the start of the conflict, and images of more than 150 schoolchildren killed in the opening days. "We have only defended ourselves," he said. "We are not terrorists."

But Pezeshkian's defiance came wrapped in an unexpected offer. "It must be understood by President Trump and those who seek to bully us that we are ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations but without the language of force," he told the assembly. The timing was deliberate. Just a day earlier, Trump had told the same body he was weighing whether to "annihilate" Iran—yet in the same breath, he praised renewed talks between Tehran and Washington's negotiators. On the sidelines of the assembly, Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi had spent three hours in a surprise meeting with US special envoy Steve Witkoff. Both sides described it as constructive. It was the first such encounter since June.

The gap between the rhetoric and the reality on the ground is where the actual negotiation lives. Pezeshkian made clear that Iran's focus is the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway that has been intermittently blockaded since the war began, sending global energy prices soaring. He signaled that Iran wants its Arab neighbors to support Tehran's proposals for the strait's future. The substance of that position is stark: Iran will not tolerate the waterway being used to transport arms that could be turned against it. This amounts to a demand for the right to inspect ships passing through—a shift that would place control of one of the world's most critical energy chokepoints under Iranian rather than international oversight. Within the past 48 hours, Iran had added a new wrinkle: the strait could be reopened within seven days if its conditions were met.

Iran has laid out seven preconditions for returning to full negotiations. They include an end to the war in all its dimensions, a halt to American military actions, lifting of the naval blockade, cessation of economic sanctions, and the release of frozen Iranian assets. The foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei confirmed that these conditions had been conveyed to the American side through Qatari mediation, and he emphasized that Iran's position had not shifted. Yet the three-hour length of the Araghchi-Witkoff meeting suggests some progress was made, or at least that both sides found enough common ground to keep talking.

The pressure on Washington is real and immediate. The US faces a November midterm election, and Republicans are desperate to lower oil prices and increase refined oil availability before voters go to the polls. The blockade in the Strait of Hormuz has reduced the number of identifiable tankers making it through to fewer than five a day. The situation is compounded by uncertainty over the Bab al-Mandab strait, another critical energy chokepoint in the Red Sea, which is threatened by Iran-backed Houthi paramilitaries. There is little appetite in the Trump administration for a full-scale war with Iran or the Houthis—Americans believe they are losing the current conflict, and it has become deeply unpopular.

For Iran, the pressure is of a different kind. Sanctions have intensified, and a US naval blockade makes it nearly impossible to export oil, depriving the country of desperately needed foreign currency. On Wednesday, Iranian civilian aircraft faced a potential worldwide grounding due to the threat of US secondary sanctions on any entity engaging with Iran's fleet. Iranian officials negotiated frantically with neighboring countries to maintain an air bridge, but Oman and Iraq appear to have been forced to close their airspace to Iranian planes. The economic strangulation is real and accelerating.

Pezeshkian's domestic audience heard defiance. He insisted that Iran did not seek special treatment but equal rights, and he questioned the double standard: "They kill, we are sanctioned." He argued that regional security lay in agreement among neighbors, not with outsiders like the US. But hardliners at home are watching closely. Mohsen Rezaei, the hardline secretary of the supreme national security council, refused to call the talks with Americans "negotiations." He warned that the Strait of Hormuz would not be opened and no negotiation would proceed until Iran's conditions were implemented. He also issued a threat to Iran's neighbors: if they implement a US-induced ban on Iranian travel, "their airports will have no flights either."

The US did grant Pezeshkian a visa to attend the assembly—a decision that had been in doubt—but Washington denied visas to several members of his entourage. When Pezeshkian began his speech, the US delegation walked out. The theater of diplomacy and the substance of it are moving on separate tracks. What happens next depends on whether the three-hour meeting in New York was the beginning of a negotiation or merely a performance of one.