President Trump said Thursday, September 17, 2026, that he is close to deciding whether to restart large-scale military action against Iran, telling Axios that a much more aggressive phase of the war remains on the table. “I have a big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them [the Iranian regime] or do I not? It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me,” he said. He repeated the threat from the UN podium on September 22: “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, or do we make a deal that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country?” At a meeting with regional leaders that same day, he put it another way: “There’s going to be a time when it’s too late, and we won’t have a chance of letting them survive as a nation.” Asked whether the decision would come before or after November’s midterms, he declined to say. Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, began February 28 and is now in its seventh month.
A Meeting With Twelve Countries
Trump met Gulf Cooperation Council leaders — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman — on the UN General Assembly’s sidelines September 22, a session that expanded to include Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, 12 countries in all. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Qatar’s Emir, Turkey’s Erdogan and Syria’s al-Sharaa attended in person; Saudi Arabia sent Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. “I think there’s a lot of momentum for them to make a deal. That’s what we’re hearing from everybody,” Trump said afterward.
The same day, U.S. and Iranian officials held their first substantial contact since a ceasefire collapsed in July: envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met for roughly three hours, with Witkoff describing mediators who “shuttled between the two sides throughout the day” and calling the talks “constructive and promising” — a notably softer account than Trump’s framing of a direct meeting. Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s earlier warnings that Tehran could strike Gulf energy facilities had already led Trump to shelve a return to major combat in early August, as Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis kept up strikes threatening Saudi Arabia separately.
A Softer Tone, a Day Earlier
Trump had sounded more upbeat on September 16: “Hopefully we’re toward the end of the war. They want to make a deal,” he told reporters, adding that Washington and Tehran deal directly rather than through intermediaries. At a Gastonia, North Carolina rally that evening, he predicted Iran “cannot keep going” and dismissed rising gas prices as “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done,” forecasting they’d soon “come tumbling down.”
Blockade, Sanctions and the Strait
Rather than open a new offensive, Washington has kept its naval blockade of Iranian ports in place. At the September 22 meeting, Trump credited Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with leading Operation Economic Outcast, the sanctions campaign Bessent launched August 24 to, in his words, “sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime.” CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said U.S. forces have helped move more than 1 billion barrels of crude through the Strait of Hormuz since May, while Iran has exported none; Iran maintains the strait is effectively closed and has offered to reopen it within a week if the blockade is lifted. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have ordered U.S. forces in the region held at current strength through year’s end.
Defiance at the UN, and a Rebuke of NATO
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told the Assembly on September 23 that Tehran would “never bow our head or bend at the knee,” while still backing “dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations without accepting the language of force” — a pairing analysts read as Iran signaling openness to a deal it can present as undefeated. Araghchi separately posted on X that he’d warned EU counterparts of “severe long-term consequences of facilitating and supporting Israeli-U.S. war crimes,” and dismissed NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who had said Europe hosted roughly 5,000 U.S. military flights supporting Epic Fury since February: “Groveling never satisfies a bully.”
Separately, a potential $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35s to Saudi Arabia cleared State Department review ahead of the Assembly, and Pezeshkian and Araghchi were both granted visas for the New York session.