Two months into the most significant US military conflict since Iraq, peace talks have stalled, oil prices are surging past $112 a barrel, and the world’s most strategically critical waterway remains closed. The question is no longer whether a deal can be reached — it is whether both sides have the will to make one.
By our Middle East Correspondent | Global Echos | April 30, 2026
ISLAMABAD. The talks that were supposed to end a war have themselves become the war’s latest casualty. On April 25, just days after Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had shuttled between Muscat, Islamabad and ultimately Moscow, President Donald Trump cancelled planned meetings between his senior envoys and their Iranian counterparts. The reason given was characteristic: “Too much time wasted on travelling, too much work!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He added, with characteristic confidence, that the US still held “all the cards.”
Whether that is strategically accurate is a matter of fierce debate. What is not debated is the cost of the impasse to the world’s consumers, supply chains and food systems.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows in peacetime, has been closed since Iran took the dramatic step of blockading it in the opening days of the conflict that began on February 28, when US and Israeli forces launched strikes on Iranian military, nuclear and energy infrastructure. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been named successor, though he has not appeared publicly since the strikes and is widely believed to have been seriously wounded. Iran has launched retaliatory strikes against Israel, US military bases across the region, and civilian and military infrastructure in Arab states aligned with Washington.
The economic fallout has been immediate and severe. International benchmark Brent Crude topped $112 a barrel this week, with no clear resolution in sight. Sweden has warned of a potential jet fuel shortage, with its energy minister noting that even a peace deal signed tomorrow would take time to restore supply chains. Qatar has warned of the possibility of a “frozen conflict” in the Gulf. The UN has declared a global food emergency risk, given the disruption to shipping routes that carry not just oil but grain, fertiliser and consumer goods through the narrow passage between Iran and Oman.
Iran’s latest proposal, transmitted to the US via Pakistani mediators, would separate the immediate crisis from the longer-term dispute. Tehran offered to reopen the Strait if the US lifted its counter-blockade on Iranian ports, while setting aside negotiations on its nuclear programme for a later stage. The proposal, described by one analyst at the Center for International Policy as “reasonable,” drew a notably cautious response from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who called it “better than what we thought they were going to submit” but insisted that the nuclear issue “still has to be confronted” and “remains the core issue here.” CNN reported that Trump was unlikely to accept the proposal in its current form, citing concerns that reopening the strait without resolving the nuclear question would remove America’s primary source of leverage.
The nuclear dimension is where the talks most fundamentally break down. The US demands that Iran suspend uranium enrichment for at least a decade and physically remove its stockpile of enriched uranium from the country. Iran has so far refused, and Araghchi made clear in Islamabad that there is no consensus within the Iranian leadership on how to address those demands. The leadership fractures themselves are a complicating factor: a government whose supreme leader is dead, whose new leader is reportedly incapacitated, and which has absorbed devastating strikes on its military infrastructure is simultaneously trying to negotiate from a position of apparent strength, knowing that the longer the strait remains closed, the more pain it inflicts on the global economy and the more pressure accumulates on Washington to settle.
Trump has sought to project Iranian weakness, writing this week that Iran “informed us that they are in a State of Collapse,” and describing its desire to reopen the Strait as a sign of desperation. Iranian officials pushed back, describing the country’s leadership transition as “a manageable issue.” The two readings of the situation are so divergent that they suggest both sides are negotiating as much with their own domestic audiences as with each other.
The conflict has also drawn sharper European commentary than Washington might prefer. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz drew Trump’s public ire this week after describing Iran’s role in the conflict in terms the White House found objectionable, prompting Trump to accuse him of wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon. King Charles III, addressing the US Congress on April 28, offered a more diplomatically freighted message, invoking NATO’s Article 5 and calling for collective resolve in a speech that drew bipartisan applause while pointedly championing multilateral institutions that Trump has repeatedly undermined.
At the US Naval station in the Persian Gulf, meanwhile, a guided-missile destroyer this week blocked an Iranian oil tanker from reaching an Iranian port, the latest in a series of confrontations along the disputed maritime boundary of the counter-blockade. Panama has reaffirmed the neutrality of its canal and expressed concern about the preservation of maritime transit routes. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage of strategic importance that previous generations of American military planners described as the most critical chokepoint on earth, is living up to that billing.
The ceasefire, technically still in effect after Trump unilaterally extended it last week, has not brought silence. Both sides have continued what officials describe as “positional” actions: seizures, blockades, selective strikes, and intelligence operations that keep the temperature high without crossing the formal threshold of resumed full hostilities. Araghchi’s visit to Moscow, where he met Vladimir Putin, adds a further dimension. Russia, which has its own interests in sustained Western distraction from Ukraine, has offered to “assist” in mediation. That offer has been met with deep scepticism in Washington.
The world economy cannot indefinitely absorb a closed Strait of Hormuz. The question is whether the political will to reopen it, on terms both sides can accept, can be found before the costs become genuinely catastrophic.
