Trump says the war is “toward the end” as Araghchi lands in Beijing before a Council vote
The president told reporters in Charlotte that Tehran “want to make a deal.” On 1 September he wrote that he could not care less whether Iran signed anything.
Asked on the tarmac at Charlotte Douglas International Airport on Wednesday how he would describe the current phase of the war, President Donald Trump said: “Well, hopefully we’re toward the end of the war,” adding that “they want to make a deal.” The remarks were carried on ABC News’s live blog and repeated in Al Jazeera’s, which added that Trump claimed on social media to have spoken with Tehran. That claim rests on Trump alone; no Iranian statement corroborating any contact surfaced, and the text of the post was not retrievable. Fifteen days earlier, in a Truth Social post reported by NBC News and The Hill, the same president wrote: “I couldn’t care less if they sign a worthless, to them, agreement. I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing.” Iran, he added then, was “just playing out the inevitable.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in China on Wednesday to meet Foreign Minister Wang Yi — his second trip to Beijing since the American and Israeli strikes of late February, according to Bloomberg, which cited a Chinese government statement issued on 15 September that did not say how long he would stay. No readout of the meeting was available. The timing is the substance: the UN Security Council is expected to vote on Thursday on renewing the mandate of the panel of experts monitoring Iran sanctions, reinstated in September 2025 after France, Germany and the United Kingdom invoked snapback. The 17 September date comes from UN diplomats speaking anonymously in Reuters copy. At an earlier session on the 1737 Committee’s work, recorded in UN meetings coverage SC/16448, the Council had to clear a procedural vote before it could debate at all.
Assessment: Read the two Trump statements as one bargaining position rather than two. “Almost total control of the Hormuz Strait” and “toward the end of the war” are both claims about leverage, made to different audiences; neither is a report of a negotiation. The unverified assertion of contact with Tehran is the part to hold at arm’s length — it costs nothing to make, is unfalsifiable in the short term, and conveniently pre-empts questions about what the strikes have achieved. Araghchi’s second Beijing trip in seven months is the harder signal: Iran is spending diplomatic capital where a veto lives, on the eve of a vote. Watch the procedural margin in the Council, not the rhetoric.