WASHINGTON — President Trump told Axios on Sunday the United States is "only semi-negotiating" with Iran and would let sanctions and a four-month naval blockade grind Tehran down, hours before Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian installed a former Revolutionary Guard commander at the head of the country's top security body.

The two moves closed a weekend of parallel signaling. Mr. Trump retreated from the ultimatum he issued last week, when he called Iran "duplicitous" and gave it "one last chance" to make a deal, according to Al Jazeera. Tehran answered by handing the Supreme National Security Council — the politburo-like body that will judge any settlement — to Mohsen Rezaei, 71, who ran the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from 1981 to 1997.

The Axios call

Mr. Trump used the interview to catalogue Iran's economic distress rather than his own military options. "We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money," he told Axios, according to CBS News. He said Iran was in "very bad shape" and credited the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, in force since mid-April, with tightening the squeeze. "It will work out. It always works out. It's like a chess game," he said.

Vice President JD Vance struck the same posture on Fox News on Saturday, saying the U.S. was "in the middle of the game" on Iran and applying "diplomatic, economic, military tools" to reach the best outcome, Al Jazeera reported.

U.S. Central Command said Saturday it has redirected 53 commercial vessels since reimposing the blockade on July 14, boarded two and disabled two others. Mr. Trump has called the operation a "wall of steel." Iranian officials have acknowledged that crude exports, about 1.5 million barrels per day before the war, are now near zero.

Rezaei's brief

Rezaei replaces Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who moves to become a political adviser to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. Zolghadr had held the secretary post since March, when Ali Larijani was killed in a U.S.-Israeli strike. Khamenei's decree naming Rezaei cited his role among the "pioneers of the Sacred Defence era" of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

Rezaei has been among the loudest voices in Tehran for holding the strait shut. He said in July that control of the waterway was worth more than "dozens of atomic bombs," Al Jazeera reported, and warned last week that the United States would "face serious risks and casualties" if the port blockade continued.

Abas Aslani, a senior research fellow at the Tehran-based Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, told Al Jazeera Iran's leadership "needed to have someone who can somehow synchronise different bodies of the government," and said Rezaei's revolutionary credentials could give him room to sell an eventual deal to hardliners at home.

A darker reading

Not everyone reads the appointment that way. Mohsen Farkhani, an international relations professor Al Jazeera also interviewed, argued the opposite — that Rezaei's arrival signals a shift toward what he called "offensive deterrence based on punishment," and readiness for a longer war of attrition rather than a settlement. Farkhani expects Tehran to adopt "less flexible" positions on both negotiations and sovereignty over the strait.

The talks that aren't

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi again denied Sunday that Tehran was in direct talks with Washington. "Yes, there is an exchange of messages through intermediaries, but this is not called negotiations," he told journalists, according to CBS News. Iran and Oman are separately negotiating the mechanics of any reopening of the strait, talks Mr. Araghchi said Saturday were "approaching the final stages."

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana told CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday that the president "needs to come out and speak forcefully on what the path forward is," even as he endorsed the blockade-and-wait approach. Iran's Supreme National Security Council has said the strait will not reopen until Washington "corrects" its behavior, ends the blockade, withdraws its forces, lifts sanctions, releases frozen assets and "completely" compensates Iran for war damage. Mr. Trump's Sunday interview offered no sign he was preparing to meet any of them.