A new offer hits Trump's desk
Tehran put a fresh proposal in front of the White House over the weekend: reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the United States lifting its naval blockade and ending the war. Nuclear discussions get pushed to a later phase, after the strait is open and the blockade comes down.
Trump met his national security team Monday to go through it. The early signal is skeptical. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, said the administration "holds the cards" and would only sign a deal that puts American interests first and keeps a nuclear weapon out of Iranian hands.
The proposal as written is silent on missiles and on Iran's regional proxies, both of which Trump has named as core demands. It also strips out the leverage US officials say they need to extract enriched uranium from Iranian stockpiles. That is the structural problem with the offer, not a tactical one.
Diplomacy on two tracks
Iran is not waiting around. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in St. Petersburg Monday meeting Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, his second leg on a tour that already included Pakistan after Trump pulled Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff from a planned Islamabad meeting Saturday.
Tehran also held its line publicly. An Iranian statement made over the weekend said the strait would not return to pre-war traffic levels "under any circumstances," even if a deal lands. That phrasing matters for traders trying to model how much Gulf flow comes back, and how fast.
What is actually moving in the strait
Some traffic crept back in. On April 25, 19 vessels transited Hormuz, with five entering and fourteen heading out under full AIS visibility, according to maritime intelligence firm Windward. That is a step up from the near-zero crossings earlier in the week, but well below normal flow.
US Navy forces also boarded the LPG tanker LPG SEVAN in the Arabian Sea on Friday. The vessel flies a Panama flag and has been tagged as part of Iran's dark fleet. OFAC added it to the sanctions list April 24.
The human toll keeps building. International Maritime Organization Secretary General Arsenio Dominguez told reporters that roughly 20,000 sailors are now stuck aboard ships waiting to clear the Gulf. There is "no safe transit anywhere in the Strait of Hormuz," he said.
Markets price in a longer crisis
Crude pushed higher Monday on the news that talks were technically alive but stuck. Brent traded at $108.11 a barrel, up 2.57%, its highest level in three weeks. WTI was at $96.38, up 2.05%. Natural gas jumped 7.69% to $2.73 per MMBtu.
Goldman Sachs took the moment to mark up its forecasts. The bank now sees Q4 Brent averaging $90 a barrel and WTI at $83, revisions of $10 and $8 respectively from prior calls. Its base case now assumes Gulf exports will not normalize until end of June, about six weeks later than its previous mid-May expectation. That timeline aligns with the Pentagon's six-month mine-clearance estimate.
The implied math is dramatic. A 1.8 mbpd global surplus in 2025 flips to a 9.6 mbpd deficit in Q2 2026, with inventory draws running 11 to 12 mbpd in April alone. Goldman analysts described those figures as without modern precedent.
What to watch next
Two flags. First, whether Trump publicly responds to the Iranian offer this week. He gave reporters no timeline on Sunday, telling them "don't rush me." Second, whether Araghchi's Moscow stop produces anything beyond optics. Russian leverage on the file is limited but not zero.
A flat rejection without a counteroffer would lock in the longer crisis path the Goldman revisions now assume. A counteroffer that includes nuclear language would surprise the market in the other direction.