WASHINGTON — The United States is keeping its negotiating channels with Iran open while preparing for other options, a senior State Department official told a Gulf security conference on Sunday, arguing that Washington cannot let Tehran “take this region and the global economy hostage.”
“The hand of negotiation has been extended, and those channels have continued to be open and active. At the same time, we’ve been also prepared to go in another direction,” Donald Blome, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, according to The Associated Press.
Blome’s remarks tracked the message Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a day earlier in Atlanta, where he hosted G20 foreign ministers. Rubio told reporters that Iran is “blowing up ships,” including vessels with Indian sailors aboard and energy cargoes bound for countries at the G20 table, and said that “talks have actually never stopped,” with “active conversations going, both – in some cases directly but often through intermediaries.”
“The President’s preference in any challenge around the world is to try to solve it diplomatically and peacefully, if possible,” Rubio said in the same press availability. He declined to set a timetable for the Qatari-mediated talks, saying that was up to President Trump, and said any deal could not endanger U.S. national security or fail to address Washington’s core concern that Iran never become a nuclear weapons power.
Pressure and economic integration
Speaking on a closing-day panel about rebuilding economies across the region, Blome called for continued economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran to change what he described as destabilizing behavior, and said the United States would not allow Tehran to acquire a nuclear weapon or threaten American partners, the Bahraini daily Al Ayam reported.
He also laid out the administration’s economic agenda for the region, according to Al Ayam’s account. Blome said President Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Syria had opened the way for investment in electricity, water and infrastructure, and that the United States, Israel and Lebanon signed a trilateral framework in June aimed at restoring Lebanese sovereignty and dismantling Hezbollah’s military infrastructure. He said Washington is working to expand the Abraham Accords, citing Kazakhstan’s commitment to join, and promoted the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor as a way to give trade routes that bypass chokepoints vulnerable to disruption.
Blome added that private capital, not development aid alone, will drive the region’s economic transformation, and pointed to the Pax Silica technology supply-chain initiative with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Israel, as well as a 5-gigawatt artificial intelligence campus in the UAE, the paper reported.
On the sidelines of the conference, Blome met Bahrain’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Shaikh Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, alongside U.S. Ambassador to Bahrain Stephanie Hallett and Michael DiMino IV, the deputy assistant secretary of war for the Near East and Central Asia, according to Shaikh Nasser’s office. The two sides discussed military and defense cooperation and the security of vital waterways and freedom of navigation, the office said.
Gulf partners hope for a breakthrough
Gulf officials at the forum also emphasized diplomacy. Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, said his country hopes a diplomatic breakthrough is possible in the Qatari-led mediation to avert another round of confrontation between the United States and Iran, the AP reported. “We don’t really want to see another round of confrontation in the region,” Gargash said. The war began Feb. 28 with joint U.S. and Israeli strikes, followed by Iranian attacks on Gulf states, according to the AP.
Gargash also said the UAE remained prepared to protect its security should hostilities resume, Gulf News reported. He spoke at the conference’s closing session alongside Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al Zayani and Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan.
Iran’s conditions
In Tehran’s telling, the mediation has narrowed the timeline for reopening the Strait of Hormuz but not the gap over terms. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera that a U.S. effort to open dialogue was “a positive step” and that talks with Qatari mediators had shortened the implementation period of Iran’s proposal to two days.
Araghchi’s conditions include lifting sanctions imposed after the collapse of the Islamabad memorandum, reducing U.S. forces in the region, restoring oil waivers and releasing frozen Iranian funds, including those held in Qatar, he told the network. Iran is also demanding recognition of shipping routes through the strait that it discussed with Oman and the closure of other routes, he said.
The two-day sequence remains a proposal, and Washington has not publicly accepted it, Gulf News reported. Rubio, for his part, said the United States has borne most of the burden of protecting commercial shipping through the strait, with “some very limited cooperation but not much” from other countries, and credited U.S. Central Command with doing “a phenomenal job of protecting this shipping.”
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