Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf says Iran does not reject negotiations but views them as a tool in its broader confrontation with the US and Israel, Tasnim reports; reiterates US must fulfill its commitments before Iran "takes steps" to reopen Hormuz

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf says Iran does not reject negotiations but views them as a tool in its broader confrontation with the US and Israel, Tasnim reports; reiterates US must fulfill its commitments before Iran "takes steps" to reopen Hormuz.

Rhetoric of this kind from Tehran has a well-worn pattern: negotiations are framed as leverage rather than a path to resolution, and reopening the strait is conditioned on prior US action, which keeps the burden of the next move on Washington. Conditioning de-escalation on the counterparty moving first has historically extended rather than resolved these standoffs, and statements carried by semi-official domestic agencies tend to reflect messaging for internal and negotiating audiences more than any operational shift. The mechanism that matters for pricing is physical: the risk premium in crude runs through freight rates, war-risk insurance and tanker routing rather than through headline tone alone, so the tell is shipping behaviour and insurance costs, not the communiques. The sequencing to note is whether the 'steps' language is echoed by other Iranian institutions and whether any US counterpart statement reciprocates, since parallel signalling has preceded past rounds of indirect talks while unilateral repetition has typically gone nowhere. On the FX side, episodes of Gulf tension have tended to support the dollar through haven demand while lifting crude, and the two channels can pull against petrocurrency and importer currencies differently. As a restatement of position rather than a new concession or threat, this is the lower-information end of the genre; the calendar items are any confirmed negotiating round and verified tanker traffic through the strait.