Seven months after the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran, Iran’s president stood at a podium in New York and told President Donald Trump that the Islamic Republic “will not yield.”
As Iran faces its most existential war yet, with President Trump’s threat of “annihilation” and economic tensions rising at home, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly that Iran will not make concessions on its nuclear program, missile defenses or control of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil once flowed.
“We cannot allow some people unfettered access to our waterways, benefit from them, and at the same time use those waterways to impose their encroachments on us, impose their insecurities on us, and deny us access to our own waterways,” Pezeshkian said.
The Iranian president used the world stage to convey Iran’s demands and Iran’s core message to President Trump, who seeks to defeat the Islamic Republic through war. President Trump boasted that the United States had “blown up” Iran’s nuclear facilities and claimed control of the Strait of Hormuz.
President Trump said from the same podium on Tuesday that he was considering whether to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and send it to “hell.” That rhetoric led Pezeshkian to rewrite the speech he had prepared before traveling to New York, and what he delivered in response was almost unanimously praised by Iranian media, even hard-line publications, he said.
Pezeshkian’s speech was one of the most anticipated speeches at this year’s United Nations gathering, and it was a rare historic moment to be delivered on American soil. It involves a foreign leader acting persistently in an enemy country that is still at war with his own country.
Despite early predictions in Washington that the fighting would be short-lived, the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran has instead dragged on, with the military operation that began with the killing of the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei resulting in months of regional instability and one of the defining foreign policy legacies of Trump’s presidency.
One of Pezeshkian’s key messages offered a glimpse of how the Islamic Republic intends to define its post-war regional position, telling Iran’s neighbors that their future security must be guaranteed or the entire region must “live together in fear.”
One expert said the message contained an implicit threat.
“Iran presented regional security as indivisible and signaled that continued pressure and conflict would impose costs across the region,” Sanam Baqir, head of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House think tank in London, told CNN.
But another expert, Hamidreza Azizi, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said the message shows Iran recognizes it needs to find a way to coexist with the rest of the region.
“This reflects the understanding that Iran ultimately needs to find an arrangement for peaceful coexistence with its neighbors,” Azizi said.
Pezeshkian spoke at the United Nations a day after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragushi spoke for at least two hours with President Trump’s peace envoy Steve Witkoff in New York, the first sign of diplomatic relations between the two countries since the ill-fated deal was struck more than three months ago.
In response to Pezeshkian’s comments, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said those talks had not resulted in significant progress and indicated that a memorandum of understanding (MoU) from earlier this year was no longer on the table.
Plans in June for further negotiations between Iran and the United States did not materialize. Instead, the conflict intensified and the region sank deeper into uncertainty about how the war would end. Domestically, Pezeshkian and other Iranian officials who have engaged diplomatically with Washington have come under intense scrutiny from rival hardliners who view any agreement with Trump as tantamount to surrender.
“The foreign minister must explain on what authorizations the meeting with representatives of the enemy of the aggressor took place,” hardline lawmaker Ebrahim Rezaei asked on Wednesday after Araghchi’s meeting with Witkov.
Mr. Pezeshkian has also drawn criticism from hard-liners for attending the New York meeting.
“His critics expressed concern that if he showed any intention to compromise to the outside world, it would be interpreted as a sign of weakness and desperation and would therefore be counterproductive for Iran, which wants to end the war on its own terms,” Crisis Group’s Azizi said.
As Mr. Pezeshkian and Mr. Aragushi communicate Iran’s demands to the world and send a message of coexistence to the region, security officials back home announced a tougher position on Iran’s negotiating tactics.
Mohsen Rezaei, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told state media in an interview broadcast around the same time as Pezeshkian’s speech that the Islamic Republic would adopt a new framework in negotiations with the United States that would require the United States to take the first step.
“Under this new framework, the era for rhetoric and negotiation per se is over,” Rezaei said in an interview. “Future talks and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will be conditioned on the United States fully implementing Iran’s demands.”
His remarks were likely intended not only to send a message to Washington but also to reassure hardliners skeptical of Iranian officials negotiating in New York.
However, as Iran conducted diplomacy at the United Nations and hinted at future coexistence with the region, the Oman Center for Maritime Security announced that one person was killed when a ship was targeted near the Strait of Hormuz.
The UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) Center said: “Ships are advised to proceed with caution.”
