In a sit-down interview with CNBC on Thursday, Donald Trump claimed that Iran has agreed to "just about everything we need" in negotiations designed to lead to a final deal to end the war that broke out at the end of February between Israel, the United States and Iran. If true, as the claim itself states, it would be an astounding shift in a negotiation that, according to just about every outsider's account, is just starting.

The president's comments coincided with ongoing negotiations between Washington and Tehran hitting a deadlock this weekend as Iranis honor the funeral of its slain supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, whose body is slated to lie in state in Tehran and will be the focus of what officials hope will be one of the biggest funerals in Iran's Islamic Republic history.

Since the war's end, Trump's rhetoric on war has changed significantly. Where he used to refer to regime change and a decisive military campaign, he now insists the campaign was not really a war at all. This is not a war per se, but denuking Iran, he said to the interviewer, repeating a phrase he has increasingly used since a ceasefire came into effect in April. He labeled Iran the "spoiled child" of the region and said it was the bully, because its leaders had gotten used to a lax hand from the United States over the years.

The problem with the president's optimism is that it is far ahead of the publically known state of the negotiations. The war that had started on February 28 with a joint US-Israeli strike campaign and killed Khamenei and much of Iran's top military leaders halted with a temporary ceasefire in April before being formalized in mid-June in a memorandum of understanding signed remotely by Washington and Tehran. That document gave both sides 60 days, extendable by mutual agreement, to negotiate a comprehensive final accord. Talks have since taken place only a few times, a direct meeting in Switzerland late in June and an indirect one in Qatar this week, and even there analysts counting the days say it remains unclear whether the 60 days has passed to this day, according to analysts tracking the talks. Diplomatic and defense officials briefed on the discussions have told American reporters this week that the negotiators have yet to confront the most difficult issues on the table, most notably what will happen to Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium and whether the Iranians will be allowed to enrich uranium at all in the future.

This is not the first time for this Administration that rhetoric and record don't match. One of the most disputed points in talks that Trump has repeatedly stated Iran agreed to physically remove its enriched uranium stockpile is one of the most contentious. Under international watch, Tehran's negotiators have suggested a way to dilute the stockpile back to reactor-grade levels instead of handing it over completely, while the supreme leader is reported to have ordered no enriched material to be brought out of the country at all. Observers of the talks say the contours of a potential agreement are "a decade-plus freeze in Iranian enrichment combined with down-blending of existing stockpiles," but warn that not much has been put in stone, and that it's no longer unusual for the two sides to disagree publicly over what they have even been discussing.

The control of the Strait of Hormuz is in dispute and, in the short term, perhaps more significant. The waterway transports about a quarter of the world's seaborne crude oil and a fifth of liquid natural gas, and the International Energy Agency has said that it would be the worst supply disruption ever for global oil markets if closed. Within days of the war's outbreak, Iran closed the strait, mined it and attacked shipping through it, while Washington responded with a naval blockade of its ports that lasted from mid-April to late May, and left thousands of mariners and ships stranded over the Gulf. In the CNBC interview, Trump brazenly claimed that during that same timeframe, the U.S. Navy moved commercial vessels through Iranian waters as many as 22 of them, in one night, on a path “right up by the coast” where Iranian missile batteries could not reach. But whatever the number is or isn't, the issue of the strait has yet to be resolved. Iran's top waterway negotiator has indicated that the waterway will not be returned to prewar conditions, and that Tehran plans to charge for use, which Washington and Gulf state Oman both oppose and a former senior US energy official has suggested Iran could make a reality in practice, due to its geographic position and naval forces.

The stakes of that standoff can hardly be overstated in the economic context. The country's central bank has recorded year-on-year inflation exceeding 83 percent by the end of June, and its statistical center estimated it at 89 percent, both of which are among the highest rates in the world. International monetary fund has forecasted about 6 percent shrink in Iran's economy during this year. The rial, already in freefall prior to the war, has continued to slide against the dollar and the central bank has introduced its biggest denomination ever a ten-million-rial note just weeks after issuing a five-million note. Trade estimates show Iran exported virtually no crude oil in May, compared with more than two million bpd prior to the war, eliminating the majority of a revenue stream that was a significant part of the government's income. Residents of Tehran say they have seen prices day by day increase by about 40 percent since the fighting started, though official figures may be less painful. While Trump's own figure to illustrate the toll 300 percent inflation, according to his CNBC appearance is higher than the officially reported figures, the situation of the economy being under extreme stress is backed up by independent trackers and even by Iran's own central bank figures.

But whether this economic pressure will result in the "widespread capitulation" Trump was predicting is another matter and a contentious one among regional experts. Some say decades of experience in absorbing sanctions, and Iran's status as a nation with alternative trade routes with China and Russia that don't involve the dollar, make it possible for the government to soldier on without a deal, as long as it doesn't collapse. Others envision an economy that has been so ravished that publicly its own leaders have admitted they may have to wait over 10 years after sanctions are lifted for it to return to normal, and that it will be hard for the government to even pay the bills. There's no doubt about it resolving the shipping dispute is far more pressing to Iran than resolving the nuclear issue, and one provides near-term revenue, the other leverage to Washington and Israel's security concerns and that's much more important to Iran.

That disconnect of incentives has lent a general sense of discomfort in Jerusalem that Trump's Thursday comments did not remove. Although Israel was a co-combatant in the initial strikes against Iran, it has not been joined to the MOU and therefore has no say in negotiations that are currently ongoing. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pointedly absent from the deal, and Israeli officials on the political left and right have condemned its provisions for failing to address any of the war's ultimate goals of stopping Iran's nuclear and missile projects and setting conditions for the regime's demise. Until recently, Israelis' approval ratings for Trump's performance in office stood significantly higher than those in the United States, but only 44 percent of Israelis believe that Israel's security is among his main preoccupations, according to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute last month.

During the interview Trump himself invoked that comparison, referring to his standing in Israel as he reverted to a longstanding talking point about American Jews, who have historically tended to vote Democratic. In each of the last three presidential elections, exit polling has revealed that Democratic nominees have won the American Jewish vote by a wide margin, and a survey conducted in April had only about a fifth of American Jews approving of the way he's doing his job, a fact Trump blamed on his "poor judgment" rather than substantive policy differences over issues such as abortion, immigration or the direction of the Iran deal itself.

Days before a NATO summit in Ankara, the president ended his day with a dig at NATO, writing on social media that his relations with the alliance have become "ridiculous" and "one-sided. He has long expressed displeasure over the reaction of some European allies to the Iran war, and wondered about the amount of U.S. involvement in the alliance compared with other members; he has voiced concerns about this issue on and off since his first term.

The pattern from the president's own account is of real, if partial, leverage a battered Iranian economy, a blockade that did some harm, a ceasefire that has been in effect for months overlaid on what sounds like a near-total capitulation, though the evidence to back this up remains to be seen. But if there is a final agreement, how much Trump says in a TV interview will be secondary to what's written in a paper he and his negotiators have yet to complete, including on questions of enrichment, uranium custody and control of one of the world's most important shipping lanes, which, according to the negotiators themselves, are still far from resolved.