Iran reframes nuclear talks: ending the war comes first
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei stated on May 25 that the nuclear file is not the primary object of the ongoing diplomatic exchange with Washington — a framing that places the Gaza conflict firmly at the centre of Tehran's negotiating calculus.
The clarification matters. Western coverage has consistently positioned the nuclear programme as the central fault line, the issue on which any accord rises or falls. Iran's表述 suggests the sequencing is inverted: resolve the regional conflict, then talk uranium.
The timing is not accidental. Baghaei's remarks arrived as multiple rounds of Omani-hosted contact between the two sides had produced what Iranian state media described as a draft memorandum of understanding — a document whose contents have not been made public, but whose broad parameters appear to include reciprocal obligations on sanctions relief, nuclear constraints, and regional de-escalation.
The central question now is whether Washington can meet those terms before the nuclear clock, which Western intelligence agencies assess as having moved considerably closer to weapons-adjacent thresholds, moves further.
What Tehran says it wants
Baghaei's statement, carried by Iranian state media on May 25, was explicit. The nuclear issue, he said, is not the focus of the current talks. The focus — as Tehran defines it — is ending the war.
This is not a new position. Iranian officials have maintained since late 2024 that the destruction of the Gaza Strip and the displacement of its population constitute a regional emergency that supercedes technical discussions about centrifuge counts and stockpile limits. But the statement on May 25 was the most direct articulation of sequencing yet delivered at the spokespeople level.
According to a senior Iranian diplomat quoted by Iranian media and reported via Telegram on May 25, the offer has a conditional structure. If the United States fulfills its commitments under the proposed memorandum of understanding, the nuclear issue and Iran's stockpiles of highly enriched material can be addressed. The conditional is doing significant work in that formulation.
The implication is straightforward: Tehran wants the ceasefire first. Everything else — including the supervised rollback of its most sensitive nuclear work — is the downstream reward for American performance on the regional track.
The American complication
What complicates this posture is the well-documented inconsistency in Washington's negotiating posture over the preceding eighteen months. The sources do not contain specific characterisations of current US positions, but the Iranian framing — that shifting American positions have complicated the talks — is consistent with a pattern observers of the Vienna and Al-Ula rounds would recognise.
The proposed memorandum of understanding, as described through Iranian state channels, represents a potential off-ramp. It offers a written framework in which both sides have visible, verifiable obligations. That kind of document matters to Tehran, which watched the previous administration's maximum-pressure campaign end in a different kind of maximalism: withdrawal without a replacement deal, leaving Iran with the worst of both worlds — sanctions intact and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action defunct.
American interlocutors have historically resisted linking the Gaza dimension to the nuclear dimension, arguing that conflating the two tracks risks making the nuclear issue hostage to a military situation Washington cannot fully control. That resistance is now running into Tehran's insistence that the linkage is not negotiable.
The Hormuz dimension
In a related clarification on May 25, Iran's diplomatic spokesperson addressed a separate concern that has circulated in Western security commentary: whether Tehran intended to impose transit tolls or restrictions through the Strait of Hormuz.
The answer, according to the same briefing carried by Fars News, was direct. Iran does not collect tolls in the Strait of Hormuz and does not seek to collect tolls.
The statement is notable less for what it says than for why it needed to be said. The Hormuz chokepoint — through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil flows — has been a recurring feature of threat-inflation discourse since 2019. The explicit denial suggests the issue had reached sufficient circulation in diplomatic back-channels to warrant a formal rebuttal at the spokespeople level.
It also signals something about Tehran's own understanding of the economic architecture it operates within. Disrupting Hormuz would trigger immediate, severe secondary sanctions pressure from European and Asian partners whose energy security depends on free passage. The denial may be tactical, but it is also structurally coherent with Iran's interests in maintaining the broadest possible coalition against the current Gaza campaign.
Regional preconditions and the normalisation question
A third dimension emerged from the May 25 briefing: Iran's characterisation of normalisation plans — widely understood to reference the post-conflict governance arrangements being discussed by Washington for Gaza — as the imposition of an abnormal entity on the region.
The language is rhetorical, but it points to a substantive disagreement. Tehran's position on post-war Gaza governance appears to reject any arrangement that entrenches Israeli主导权 over the strip's political future without a credible Palestinian-led alternative. That position is shared, to varying degrees, by most regional actors outside the US alliance architecture.
Whether this amounts to a veto on any final agreement or simply a negotiating position designed to extract concessions in the memo framework is not answered by the available sources. What is clear is that the memoranda being circulated in Muscat address more than centrifuge cascades. They touch on the shape of the regional order.
What this means
The stakes are significant and they are asymmetric. For Tehran, the memorandum represents a chance to restore the economic connectivity that sanctions have foreclosed, while preserving the nuclear infrastructure that gives any future negotiating posture its leverage. The sequencing demand — ceasefire first, nuclear second — is not incidentally related to this goal. It keeps the pressure on Washington to deliver a regional outcome that Iran cannot achieve through its own military means.
For Washington, the complication is structural. The United States has spent the past two administrations trying to prevent the nuclear question from being linked to broader regional conflicts, precisely because the linkage expands the scope of what any deal must contain. Tehran is now making that linkage explicit, and the memoranda circulating in Oman are the instrument through which it is doing so.
The next several weeks — not months — will test whether the two governments can settle the sequencing question before the nuclear timeline settles it for them.
This publication's reporting on the nuclear talks has prioritised the Iranian diplomatic record as represented through state media channels, supplemented by the limited publicly available documentation on the proposed memorandum. The US side's characterisation of the memo's terms has not been independently confirmed in the sources available at time of publication.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/thecradlemedia/4821
- https://t.me/wfwitness/2294
- https://t.me/FarsNewsInt/1103
- https://t.me/FarsNewsInt/1101