Iranian President Pezeshkian says Iran did not initiate the war, it defended itself; Iran continues to consider diplomacy and negotiation as the main path to resolving disputes, Tasnim reports

Iranian President Pezeshkian says Iran did not initiate the war, it defended itself; Iran continues to consider diplomacy and negotiation as the main path to resolving disputes, Tasnim reports.

Statements of this kind from an Iranian president sit in a familiar pattern: Tehran has historically paired any period of open hostilities with public insistence that it acted defensively while keeping the door to negotiation open, and the conciliatory half of that message has typically been the part crude markets trade. In past episodes of direct Iran-related escalation, the premium in WTI and Brent has tended to bleed out when rhetoric shifts from retaliation to diplomacy, and to rebuild only when kinetic events follow, since the durable driver is physical supply risk through Gulf export infrastructure and Hormuz transit rather than words themselves. The distinction worth drawing is between de-escalatory signalling from the presidency and the position of the security establishment and supreme leader, who hold actual authority over military and nuclear posture; presidential remarks alone have historically been a weak predictor of policy. Freight rates, war-risk insurance premia and prompt timespreads are the channels where genuine de-escalation shows up first, ahead of flat price. The follow-ons that matter are any reciprocal tone from the other parties, movements in shipping behaviour, and whether back-channel or formal talks are confirmed. As rhetoric rather than action, the signal is directional at best.