Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the Speaker of Iran’s Parliament, said Friday there will be no negotiations with the U.S. without a ceasefire in Lebanon and a release of blocked Iranian assets.

Qalibaf wrote on the social platform X that two measures “mutually agreed upon between the parties have yet to be implemented.”

“These two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin,” he wrote.

thehill.com - Iran lebanon israel US ceasefire talks

Apparently, Iran is happy enough with the status quo right now to risk postponing tomorrow's negotiations. Leave aside that the U.S. is pretty unlikely to agree to these preconditions, even if we were amenable to doing so it would probably take more than the twelve hours between now and tomorrow morning in Islamabad to get it done. Hopefully this is just posturing, but even the posturing is an unwelcome sign that Iran's not feeling much pressure to cut a deal - because they would know that making these kinds of statements runs the risk of Trump reacting in a way that scuttles the negotiations.

Trump's statement today that the Iranians “don’t seem to realize they have no cards other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways” is a bit silly: of course they have no cards to play other than the cards they have to play. But it turns out, those cards (blocking the strait and the ability to attack other regional energy infrastructure) are pretty strong cards, and they've been very effective so far.