The US Iran nuclear negotiations remained the subject of sharply conflicting accounts on Tuesday, as Washington and Tehran exchanged military strikes while both sides disputed whether diplomatic contact had broken down entirely.
US Central Command said it had defeated multiple Iranian ballistic missiles and drones before launching what it described as defensive strikes following attempted attacks by Iran. The exchange marked a fresh escalation in a conflict that has already caused widespread disruption to oil and gas infrastructure across the Middle East.
Trump and Rubio insist US Iran nuclear negotiations are ongoing
President Donald Trump pushed back firmly against reports that talks had stalled. ‘Fake News Reports that the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the U.S.A., stopped speaking a few days ago are false and erroneous,’ he wrote in a Truth Social post on Tuesday afternoon.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio backed that position before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying that as part of ongoing discussions, ‘there is the prospect’ that Iran ‘could negotiate aspects of their nuclear program.’ That framing kept open the idea of a broader deal, though Rubio’s careful language stopped well short of any confirmed agreement.
The claims ran directly counter to Iranian media reports. State-linked outlet Tasnim reported on Monday that Iranian negotiators would cease indirect communications with the US and that Tehran would seek to fully close the Strait of Hormuz, a critical passageway for global crude shipments. Iran’s Fars news agency said on Tuesday that the two sides had not exchanged messages for several days.
Rubio’s wider message to US diplomats in the region
Away from the public back-and-forth, Rubio also moved to tighten discipline among US representatives in the region. According to The Guardian, Rubio told American ambassadors across the Middle East to stop making public comments that could inflame tensions and undermine Trump’s pressure on Iran to relinquish its capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.
The directive was widely interpreted as a pointed rebuke of the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, following his appearance on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s podcast, in which he said Israel had a biblical right to much of the land in the Middle East. Such statements, coming from a sitting diplomat, risked cutting across the delicate messaging around the US Iran nuclear negotiations at precisely the moment Washington was insisting talks remained alive.
The episode illustrated the difficulty of managing a multi-front pressure campaign: military action, economic leverage and diplomacy running simultaneously, with individual voices capable of complicating any of the three at short notice.
Oil and gas sector counts the cost
Beyond the diplomatic manoeuvring, the physical toll of the conflict on energy infrastructure is becoming clearer. Analysts at Fitch Group said on Tuesday that the US-Iran war has caused widespread disruption across the Middle East’s oil and gas sector, with exports collapsing, production shut in, and repeated strikes on infrastructure leaving billions of dollars in damage and extending recovery timelines.
‘Based on our analysis of conflict-related disruptions to production, repair horizons for damaged assets and recovery horizons for shuttered fields, we assess that Qatar, Bahrain and Iraq have faced the heaviest exposure to the conflict,’ the Fitch Group analysts said.
Oil prices have responded to each new development in the standoff, with Brent crude sensitive to any signals about the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes through the strait, making any credible threat to close it a direct concern for global energy markets.
Rubio’s insistence that the US Iran nuclear negotiations remain open, and Trump’s direct denial of a communication breakdown, now set up the next round of back-channel contacts as the moment that will test whether either government’s public account holds up. Rubio’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is the most concrete public benchmark for where those talks currently stand.
