Iran Rejects U.S. Narrative That It Must Adhere to Trump’s ‘Disingenuous’ Negotiation Framework
Tehran put forward its own terms to end the war, a senior Iranian official tells Drop Site, despite claims it has not responded to Trump.
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Over the past week, both the U.S. and Iran delivered frameworks to mediators aimed at ending the ongoing war. The Trump administration is now insisting that its framework must be the basis for any negotiations, a high-level Iranian official told Drop Site, as President Donald Trump’s top envoy on Friday repeatedly asserted that direct talks are imminent and that the U.S. expects a response from Tehran in the coming days.
Trump has portrayed the diplomatic situation as the U.S. offering a desperate and broken Iran a chance to end the war. “They’re being hit so hard, anybody would be negotiating. They are negotiating. They’re begging to make a deal,” Trump said in remarks at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Miami on Friday. “Turned out I was right, they were negotiating.”
But Iran, which continues to launch regular missile and drone attacks at Israel and at U.S. military sites across the Persian Gulf, maintains that Trump is sinking deeper into a quagmire and Tehran will decide when the war ends. The senior Iranian official with direct knowledge of internal deliberations said that both Iran and the U.S. recently submitted their own sets of terms and conditions to end the war via intermediaries. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, pointed out that it was the U.S. that abandoned formal direct talks last month mediated by Oman. On February 28, two days before scheduled technical discussions were to take place in Vienna, the U.S. and Israel began a massive bombing campaign they claimed was aimed at overthrowing the Iranian government.
Since the war began, messages have been delivered through intermediaries, most recently through Pakistan. The senior Iranian official said that Iran, however, remains deeply skeptical of Trump’s sincerity and cannot rule out that the entire process is a smokescreen ahead of a major military escalation. As of this publication, Iran was still contemplating whether to offer any further response to the U.S. terms, as Tehran’s view is that it already has laid out its own framework for starting diplomatic negotiations.
“The Americans are not prepared to engage in what can genuinely be called negotiations. Rather, they seek to impose their own terms,” the Iranian official told Drop Site. “They are clearly being disingenuous. We have had, and continue to have, the Omani platform for negotiations. Their unwillingness to engage within that framework calls into question the sincerity of their claims regarding negotiation and diplomacy.”
Neither the White House nor Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, immediately responded to a request for comment.
Iran has consistently said that it will not accept what it views as a temporary ceasefire akin to the one requested by the U.S. and Israel that ended the “12-Day War” in June 2025. From Iran’s perspective, that agreement only served to buy the U.S. and Israel time to prepare for the larger war they ultimately unleashed last month.
Among Iran’s terms for permanently ending the war are a longterm guarantee that the U.S. and Israel will not attack Iran again and that any ceasefire also apply to Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine; reparations for the damages done to Iran during the war; sanctions relief; and that Iran retain control over the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian official told Drop Site Iran also addressed issues related to nuclear enrichment in its proposal but declined to offer specific details.
“They’re trying to frame Iran as a country that refuses to negotiate, while in reality we have a clear, logical position that the war must come to an end,” the Iranian official said. “We have conveyed our own positions to them, encompassing both the format of the negotiations and the substance of the issues to be addressed.”
Witkoff, speaking at the investment forum in Miami on Friday, reiterated the U.S. claim that Washington had presented the Iranians a plan but had heard nothing in response. “We have a 15-point deal on the table that the Iranians have had for a bit of time. We expect an answer from them,” Witkoff said, adding that he was hopeful that sit-down negotiations could begin as early as this week.
On Saturday, Trump asserted that Iran had 48 hours to open the Strait of Hormuz before facing attacks on civilian infrastructure. On Monday, he extended the deadline several days, and then extended it again on Thursday—saying Iran had requested the extension. The Iranian official said that any deadline extension had never, in fact, been requested by Iran, as Trump had claimed. Mediators also confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that no such request was made by Iran.
Trump, in a speech on Friday, repeated his demands. “They have to open up the Strait of Trump—I mean Hormuz,” he said in wide-ranging remarks. “Fake news will say ‘he accidentally said.’ No, there’s no accidents with me. Not too many.”
“I think we have regime change already,” he declared.
Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, was lead negotiator in the previous two rounds of talks, both of which ended with surprise U.S. attacks. “My definition of real negotiating would be right here,” Witkoff said, pointing to himself and the moderator, “and we don’t leave until we’re done. And we’ve offered that and we think there will be meetings this week. We’re certainly hopeful for it.”
While Trump has repeatedly claimed that Iran has been “begging” him to negotiate, Drop Site reported last week that it was Witkoff who repeatedly texted Iranian officials and passed messages via intermediaries.
Trump earlier this week celebrated a “gift” he claimed Iran had presented him as a gesture of good faith. He later claimed that the gift was the passage of ten oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, as a way for the Iranians to “make up for their misstatement” regarding the absence of negotiations. The Iranian official said that some Pakistani ships have been cleared to pass through the Strait since the war began as a result of bilateral “goodwill” discussions between Islamabad and Tehran. “The whole claim about ships passing through had nothing to do with Trump or the U.S. at all,” he said. Iran has maintained that the Strait remains open to some ships from friendly nations as long as they are not connected to the U.S. or Israel.
Yet Witkoff pointed to it as a sign of warming relations. “Ships are passing, that’s a very, very good sign,” he said.
Despite Witkoff’s claims of progress, massive attacks continued unabated Friday, as the U.S. and Israel launched a coordinated bombing campaign on three steel plants, in Mobarakeh, Esfahan, and Khuzestan, targeting the heart of the Iranian economy. Mobarakeh Steel Company is the largest steel production facility in the Middle East and North Africa. Israel also claimed credit for striking the Arak heavy water nuclear reactor, an attack that could lead to radioactive fallout if powerful enough.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Friday that “Iran will exact [a] HEAVY price for Israeli crimes” carried out “in coordination with the U.S.” After Trump claimed he was postponing civilian infrastructure attacks, Araghchi said on Twitter, the “attack contradicts POTUS extended deadline for diplomacy.” On Friday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps published a list of targets that included steel plants across the Persian Gulf.
Witkoff, who made no mention of Iran’s proposed framework, said at the forum Friday that the U.S. terms presented to Iran were sweeping and would “solve it all.”
“It would solve the enrichment question, which is, we can’t have enrichment there today. It would solve the [nuclear] material question,” he said. “They have close to 10,000 kilograms of enriched material stockpiled, which they have to give up.”
“It would solve the stockpiling question, and the oversight question,” Witkoff went on. “So all of these are red lines for us, but we’re not looking to see the dissolution of the Iranian people.”
Iran has expressed deep concerns about the U.S. negotiating team consisting of Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. In the 2009 and 2015 negotiations with Iran, President Barack Obama dispatched multi-disciplinary teams consisting of senior U.S. officials and subject area specialists. During the February negotiations, according to The Guardian, Trump did not send U.S. technical experts to accompany Witkoff and Kushner.
“We made it clear to the mediator that these individuals have no familiarity with diplomacy,” the Iranian official told Drop Site. “The U.S. delegation in the negotiations should include people who are technically well-versed in regional issues, nuclear matters, and peace processes.”
It's really quite fascinating, this opportunity to witness Trump and his lieutenants spinning events in realtime that are in fact quite easily refuted with a quick fact checking regimen. Their putting on one hell of a Kabuki theater, but eventually the show will come to an end. They can fool the investor class, the MAGA faction, and a healthy portion of uninformed Americans - but sooner rather than later, the natural consequences of this catastrophe will overtake the propaganda, forcing all stakeholders to choose between terminal delusion or sober reckoning.
The US and Israel initiated this disaster - unprovoked, for precise reasons not yet fully known. I know this for certain: everything Iran has done and continues to do - **in response** - to the obscene violence of the US and Israel, was and still is clearly conveyed well in advance by the Iranians. They have not broken their word. They have been forthright in their warnings of what to expect in retaliation for any given scenario. Iran is the victim here. And for a victim, Iran has been overwhelmingly measured, wise, and capable in their retaliation. Retaliation **is** their only means of self-defense. Any fair mind must conclude that if your existence is **truly** on the line, you will do what you must with what you have to ensure a favorable outcome.
Essentially, there is only one single thing anyone reliably can count on. It is reliable as night following day. In a world where it is said that the only constant in the world is change, there is an exception.
The great constant is that Trump will always profit. And the amount of profit will scale with number of lies that come out of his mouth. He honed that skill cheating an entire generation of contractors in New York. From the 5 Boroughs to the entire globe.