Trump says US will have Strait of Hormuz 'open fairly soon'

STORY: :: Trump says the U.S. will have the Strait of Hormuz 'open fairly soon' 

:: April 10, 2026

REPORTER: "What did you tell JD Vance before he left, sir?"

TRUMP: "Well, I wish him luck. He's got a big thing. We'll find out what's going on there. Militarily defeated. And now we're going to open up the Gulf with them, with or without them. But that'll be open. We're going to be. Or the Strait, as they call it. And I think it's going to go pretty quickly. And if it does, it will be able to finish it off one way or the other. It's going well. The, the navy's gone. The air force has gone. All anti-aircraft is gone. The leaders are gone. The whole place is gone. So we'll see how it turns out. So it's JD, it's Steven, it's Jared. We have a good team, and they meet tomorrow. We'll see how it all works out."

REPORTER: "What would a good deal look like for you?"

TRUMP: "No nuclear weapons, number one. You know, I think it's already been regime change, but we never had that as a, as a criteria. No nuclear weapon. That's 99% of it...  

REPORTER: "...the Strait of Hormuz as well?"

TRUMP: "Yeah, but that'll open up automatically. Yeah, the answer is yes, but the Strait will open up. If we just left the Straits's gonna... Otherwise, they make no money. So the Strait is going to open. But what we have is no nuclear weapon. But we'll open the Strait anyway. Don't forget, we don't use the Strait. Other countries use the Strait. So we do have other countries coming up and they'll help out. But we don't. We don't use it. It won't be easy. It won't be. I would say this. We will have that open fairly soon."

REPORTER: "What's your backup plan if the...?"

TRUMP: "You don't need a backup plan."

Iran's negotiating team arrived in Islamabad on Friday for peace talks with the United States, even as Tehran insisted on measures it said needed to be addressed first, throwing last-minute doubt over the meetings scheduled in Pakistan. 

Trump announced a two-week ceasefire in the six-week war on Tuesday, just hours before a deadline after which Trump ?had threatened to destroy Iran's civilization.

The ceasefire has halted U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran. But it has not ended Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused the biggest-ever disruption to global energy supplies, or calmed a parallel war between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Iran's parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on X that Washington had previously agreed to unblock Iranian assets and to a ceasefire in Lebanon, and added that talks would not start until those pledges are fulfilled.