Over the weekend, Iranian leaders began communicating their desiderata for ending the war in the Middle East with a markedly different tone than they have used in the recent past. Rather than suggesting no negotiations with the US until Donald Trump leaves office (as some Iranian officials were suggesting just a few days ago), Supreme National Security Council Chair Mohsen Rezaei, a hardline IRGC veteran of the Iran-Iraq War put in place by Supreme Leader Mujtaba Khamenei, told al Jazeera over the weekend that Iran was prepared to return to the negotiating table with the Trump Administration and had transmitted its conditions for talks via the Qatari and Pakistani mediators. Subsequently Reuters reported, according to a senior Iranian official that the Iranian delegation to the United Nations was empowered by Mujtaba to begin negotiations with the US and was prepared to open the Strait in seven days if the US took steps to end its blockade. Admittedly the conditions that Iran stipulated were simply a repackaging of their standard positions, but the tone was clearly meant to suggest an openness to negotiations that had been absent heretofore.