Trump administration ‘confident’ Iran deal will be signed Sunday: Waltz

Skip to content

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said on Sunday that the Trump administration is “confident” a final peace deal with Iran will be signed on Sunday.

“I’m confident, the team is confident,” he told reporter Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.” “Again, I’ll let the final details be announced by them. I don’t want to get ahead of the president or the vice president, but they have every intent of getting this done today.”

President Trump previously said the U.S. and Iran could most likely reach a deal to end their conflict sometime on Sunday. The deal would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to allow the passage of roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas, and give both parties 60 days to discuss the future of Iran’s nuclear program.

Waltz said the details in the memorandum of understanding (MOU), which outlines these and several other conditions for a deal, will “be worked out as we go forward into the next round of negotiations.”

“And I just can’t over-emphasize our Gulf allies –– the Kuwaitis, the Bahrainis, the Qataris, especially the [United Arab Emirates] –– are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us,” he said. “The Iranians have shown their true colors and I think they’ve made a massive strategic mistake by attacking its allies and its neighbors the way it has.”

He said that the frozen Iranian assets set to return to Iran under the peace deal “will not be upfront cash, so to speak, that we saw in the Obama deal,” referring to the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal with Iran. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.

“And then secondarily, this is all about verification, and there were huge gaps in the JCPOA and the Obama nuclear deal in terms of actually verifying what we know,” Waltz continued. “We know the Iranians have tended to cheat on in the past, there were not ‘any-time, anywhere’ inspections of their facilities. The Iranians could delays things, they could choose which list of inspectors they accepted or not.”

Waltz later added that there will be no “massive loopholes” with how the new deal will address Iran’s nuclear program, and that “no one on this team is just going to take the Iranians at their word.”

The ambassador called the Iranian officials “incredibly difficult negotiators, coupled with the fact that they’re having a very hard time getting guidance from their supreme leader.”

Qatari negotiators flew to Tehran on Sunday to meet with Iranian officials as part of efforts to finalize the peace deal, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. But Iranian state media has suggested that a deal will likely not be signed on Sunday but could be in the coming days.

“We must wait for the exact timing of the agreement’s signing. It will NOT happen tomorrow, but it could take place in the coming days,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei told the Islamic Republic Iran Broadcasting on Saturday, contradicting Trump. “Due to the other side’s inconsistency, we must remain cautious in commenting on the process.”

Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern neighborhood could jeopardize the talks. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said it responded to “continued Hezbollah attacks on Israel’s territory.” A source told NewsNation, The Hill’s sister network, that the strikes “are creating issues” with the emerging deal between the U.S. and Iran.

Tags

Barack Obama

Donald Trump

Martha Raddatz

Mike Waltz

Obama

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.