The White House said President Donald Trump and his security team are discussing Iran’s peace plan to halt the conflict, and Trump and his top security advisers are currently reviewing Iran’s offer.
The review follows high-level contact earlier this month: JD Vance led what officials described as the highest-level talks with Iran in nearly 50 years, and Trump’s negotiators have included Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff since last year. A senior adviser told reporters that the Iranian side specifically requested Vance, and a former official highlighted why those three matter to the president, saying, “One is the fact that they’ve got the trust of the president, and one is the fact that they have instant access to the president.”
The other principal thread in the talks, according to Henry S. Ensher, is immediate relief for global trade: “The top of the agenda has to be reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” Ensher said, and he argued the strait is easier to resolve than the nuclear file. Ensher warned that reopening the Hormuz trade route unconditionally would be “a strategic victory for Iran – no way to soft-pedal that,” but added he expects Washington to treat the strait as more amenable to a quicker solution and to put nuclear negotiations on a different timeframe.
That calculation matters now because the conflict’s violence is continuing on other fronts. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel has struck forces in Lebanon’s security zone and north of the Litani, declaring that Lebanon now holds only about 10 percent of Hezbollah’s arsenal compared with what it had at the start of the war. Israeli attacks in those areas have killed 2,521 people in Lebanon since March 2, officials say.
Context makes the trade-off sharper. Trump’s negotiators are largely political loyalists and outsiders rather than career diplomats, a fact that shapes how Tehran and third parties judge Washington’s offers. Iran’s faith in Kushner and Witkoff is thin after last year’s diplomacy ended in a 12-day war, and that history appears to have pushed negotiators to accept Vance’s involvement this month.
The tension in the talks is immediate and practical: reopening the Strait of Hormuz would ease the economic pain tied to disrupted shipping but would also hand Tehran a symbolic and tangible win. Ensher spelled out the likely sequence plainly, saying he suspects the parties will prioritize the strait for a quicker settlement and leave the nuclear issue on a separate, longer timetable. At the same time, the inclusion of political loyalists with instant presidential access complicates traditional bargaining, since Washington’s counterparts are being judged less as diplomats than as extensions of the president’s inner circle.
The consequence is a dealmaking calculus that privileges speed over comprehensiveness. Officials in the White House are reviewing Iran’s offer with advisers who have the president’s confidence and direct lines to him, while military pressure in Lebanon continues to mount. The most consequential near-term outcome is therefore predictable: the United States and Iran are likely to focus first on reopening the Strait of Hormuz to steady global trade, and to defer resolution of the nuclear file to a later phase—precisely the scenario Ensher said he expects.
That choice will define the next weeks of diplomacy. If Washington accepts a quick reopening of Hormuz, it will ease immediate economic strains but hand Tehran a political victory; if it refuses, pressure on global markets will persist even as fighting and casualties continue in Lebanon. The administration’s review now will reveal which risk the president is prepared to take.
