Hendra Wijaya
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has told Al Jazeera that Tehran no longer has confidence in negotiations with Washington, pointing to a pattern in which earlier rounds of talks were quickly followed by military strikes and the reimposition of sanctions. The remarks, delivered in an interview carried by Al Jazeera's NewsFeed on 26 September 2026, amount to a blunt public assessment from Iran's head of state about the state of a diplomatic track that had been central to regional and international efforts to de-escalate the conflict.
The president's comments came only hours after a closely related development in the same news cycle: US President Donald Trump rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a move Tehran had offered to carry out within seven days. The sequencing is difficult to overstate. Even as Iran's president publicly downgraded the credibility of dialogue with Washington, the American president was dismissing a concrete, time-bound initiative from the same government, closing off an avenue that negotiators had been working to restore.
Al Jazeera's summary of the interview does not specify which particular strikes or sanctions Tehran was referring to, and Pezeshkian did not set out specific conditions for resuming negotiations. That ambiguity is itself instructive. A leader who wants to reopen a channel typically frames trust as recoverable — citing specific commitments, offering a roadmap, and identifying what would need to change. A statement that trust has been "lost" speaks less to a negotiating intention than to a warning that the diplomatic framework has been exhausted for the moment, and that Tehran's next moves will be judged by what Washington does, not by what it says.
The Hormuz offer is the most consequential element of the day's developments. The narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman is widely regarded as one of the most strategically important energy chokepoints in the world, and any sustained disruption to transit through it has historically been associated with sharp increases in freight insurance, tanker rates and regional energy prices. Tehran's offer to reopen it within a week suggested an urgency about restoring normal commercial traffic, and the immediate rejection suggests Washington was not prepared to treat the proposal as a serious or verifiable step.
The refusal also lands against the backdrop of earlier US-Iran understandings. Al Jazeera has been tracking a running file on the strait, including what has happened since a US-Iran memorandum of understanding was reached on 17 June — a reference point that frames the current standoff as the latest chapter in a process that had, at one stage, produced a working framework. The restatement of the article's coverage, filed under the running US-Israel conflict with Iran, suggests a trajectory in which earlier agreements have been overtaken by subsequent escalation rather than built upon.
Regional diplomacy is being played out on several stages at once. At the United Nations General Assembly, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister accused Iran of "flagrant attacks" and simultaneously condemned the Houthi movement, while Cuba's foreign minister accused Washington of deliberately inflicting humanitarian suffering. Those interventions illustrate how a dispute centred on Tehran's relationship with Washington is now being framed across the UN as a contest over responsibility, legitimacy and the consequences of sanctions and military action — precisely the issues Pezeshkian raised when he tied his loss of trust to attacks and sanctions.
The same day of Al Jazeera's coverage carried a cluster of stories that underline how wide the fallout has become. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia's war in Ukraine will continue "through to the end," even as Russia scaled up strikes and the country's largest steelmaker halted operations — a reminder that Tehran is not the only government for whom the international order has become a zero-sum arena. Elsewhere, Ireland's national team voted to go ahead with a Nations League fixture against Israel, and student protesters disrupted a corporate panel on artificial intelligence and the climate, showing how the conflict's politics have migrated into sport, commerce and civic life.
For analysts of the region, the practical question is what Pezeshkian's signal actually forecloses. Iran's position on the strait is a source of leverage and a source of risk at the same time: closure or continued obstruction raises the cost to everyone, including Iran's own trading partners, while reopening it under Iranian terms is politically difficult for Washington to accept. A public declaration that talks can no longer be trusted removes the ambiguity that diplomats often rely on, and it narrows the space for the private channels that have historically carried the most sensitive back-channel work.
The immediate indicators to watch are practical rather than rhetorical: whether a new memorandum or timeline emerges, whether sanctions relief is offered in exchange for verifiable movement on shipping, and whether strikes taper. Absent such steps, the combination of a rejected Iranian offer and a public repudiation of negotiations points toward a period of sustained confrontation rather than a return to the table — with the costs borne first by commercial shipping, regional economies and civilians living under the shadow of the conflict.
For now, Pezeshkian's message to Al Jazeera is best read as a statement of intent: Iran intends to treat Washington's words and actions as the measure of whether diplomacy is possible again. Whether that is a negotiating position designed to extract concessions, or a genuine closing of the door, will be determined by events in the days and weeks ahead — starting, most immediately, with what becomes of the seven-day Strait of Hormuz proposal that Washington turned down.
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