The meeting between Trump and Xi came a day after US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held a new round of indirect negotiations with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Axios reports

• Qatari officials participated in the negotiations, passing messages between the two parties, sources with direct knowledge said.
• The sources said Araghchi gave Witkoff and Kushner Iran's conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and resuming nuclear talks.
• "It was the same terms the Iranians spoke about publicly before the meeting," the source said.
• Iran proposed reopening the strait and resuming nuclear talks in a week, if the US lifts its naval blockade, removes sanctions on oil sales and reinstates a ceasefire across the region.
• The US negotiators made it clear to the Iranians during the talks on Tuesday that Iran doesn't control the strait and therefore can't make demands about it.
• A source with knowledge of the mediation efforts said Qatar and Iran are waiting to hear Trump's response to the Iranian proposal. "It is still early to know where it is going, but there are some positive movements," the source said.

Back-channel nuclear contacts conducted through Gulf intermediaries on UN sidelines follow a well-worn template: Qatar and Oman have repeatedly served as message-passers in US-Iran episodes, and the pattern in past rounds has been an exchange of maximalist opening positions followed by slow convergence, if any. The structure here is instructive: Tehran is bundling the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions relief, and a regional ceasefire into a single package, which mirrors its historical approach of linking the nuclear file to broader regional files, a linkage Washington has typically resisted. The US riposte that Iran does not control the strait is itself a familiar bargaining posture, since threats to Hormuz have historically functioned as Iranian leverage rather than as an executable policy; actual closures have never been sustained, and the credible-risk premium in crude has tended to fade once diplomatic channels reopen. The sequencing matters more than the content: envoys without formal diplomatic rank negotiating ahead of a leadership-level meeting is the standard shape of exploratory track-two contact, and outcomes at that level have historically depended on whether the principals endorse or disown the terms floated. The near-term tells are whether the proposal is acknowledged publicly by either capital, whether the intermediaries are re-tasked for a second round, and whether any de-escalatory steps on shipping or enforcement precede further talks. As long as the channel stays open, precedent argues for containment of the geopolitical premium rather than its removal.