Is There a Deal With Iran? What Ghalibaf Said on 15 Nov

There is no deal with Iran, and on Sunday 15 November Tehran’s chief negotiator said the standoff cannot go on as it is. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf told an open session of parliament in Tehran that Iran will not remain in a state of “neither war nor peace”. “If it accepts our seven reasonable conditions, the door to an agreement will be open,” he said of the United States.

If Washington makes another mistake, he said in the same speech, Iran’s armed forces will “determine the geography of the battlefield”.

Washington has said three times in a week that it can wait. President Donald Trump wrote on 12 November: “We don’t need a deal with Iran.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on 13 November that there is “no need for military action”. The dated record of the diplomacy is on the Iran US talks tracker.

• Ghalibaf said on 15 November that it makes no difference to Iran whether the United States chooses talks or war, and that an agreement is open on Iran’s seven conditions.
• Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said the same day that Iran and the United States have not discussed suspending uranium enrichment, and that no attack on Iran will go unanswered.
• Trump, Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent each said between 9 and 13 November that the pressure on Iran is working.
• Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on 15 November that six of their drones targeted an American radar in Bahrain. Bahrain said it intercepted the attack.

Ghalibaf leads Iran’s negotiating team and met Vice President JD Vance in Islamabad in April. “We do not care whether the US chooses the path of negotiations or war,” he told the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, in the English text published by Iranian state media. The seven conditions, he said, are the result of the Iranian nation’s sacrifices.

A new war would not stay inside Iran, he warned. Its consequences, he said, would reach many parties.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, had told a television interviewer on 13 November that he had moved from his Washington home to a military base on Secret Service instructions, after Iranian threats to his life. He called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a “cornered animal”.

“The absurd statements and immoral language of the US Treasury Secretary reveal their profound desperation,” Ghalibaf said. A man who had fled his home for military shelters, he said, “would do better to reflect on their strategic failures in the Persian Gulf”.

Ghalibaf also said Iranians have lived through more than eight months of war. He acknowledged inflation, unemployment and unstable prices, and said protecting people’s livelihoods is the minimum duty of every official.

“We will not leave any military attack or aggression unanswered, and we have proven this in practice,” Baghaei told his weekly press conference in Tehran the same day.

A reporter asked whether Iran might suspend enrichment for a time under an agreement with Washington. Baghaei said the two sides are not at that stage and have not discussed the details of the nuclear file at all.

“The world views US diplomatic claims with suspicion,” he said, accusing Washington of using diplomacy to set ambushes. In a post on X he wrote that the United States had “twice, in less than nine months” attacked Iran “in the midst of diplomatic negotiations”. The war began on 28 February.

Baghaei said no improvement should be expected in relations with the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors remain shut out of Iran. “As long as we remain a member of the NPT, we are committed to its obligations,” he said. The NPT is the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Iran’s Assembly of Experts said on 12 November that a review of membership had become necessary. The treaty and the exit clause are explained in Can Iran Withdraw From the NPT?.

The secretary of state, Baghaei wrote on X on 14 November, was “openly and insolently threatening to starve Iranians through a blockade”. He said it was an admission of war crimes.

Rubio had told reporters in Paris on 10 November: “Eventually you have to eat; eventually you have to be able to pay your own fighters and your own security forces.” American officials say the blockade is aimed at the government.

Iran says its letter has had no official reply, and Trump’s post of 12 November is the last word from the White House.

The Guards said on Sunday that six drones targeted an American air defence radar at Riffa, hours before Ghalibaf spoke of the geography of the battlefield. The claim and Bahrain’s alerts are set out in Iran Attacks US Base in Bahrain.

Iranian state media said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is travelling to Pakistan, which hosted the Vance and Ghalibaf meeting in April, for a gathering of regional foreign ministers.

The Kremlin says Trump will meet Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Shenzhen on 19 November.

Members of parliament say bills on leaving the NPT are on the Majlis agenda, and Baghaei said on Sunday that the decision belongs to “the relevant Iranian institutions”.

Neither government has named a date for talks. The blockade of Iranian ports remains in place, and so do Iran’s seven conditions.