Iran live updates: Senate narrowly votes to advance war powers resolution

Asked if he personally believes the U.S. will reach a deal with Iran, Vice President JD Vance stopped short of confirming the two sides will agree.

"What I think is that the Iranians want to make a deal. What I think is that the Iranians recognize that a nuclear weapon is the red line for the United States of America, that they've internalized that. But we're not going to know until we're actually putting pen to paper on signing a deal," Vance told reporters during remarks at the White House Tuesday.

"We've had a lot of drafts, a lot of, you know, a lot of pieces of paper going back and forth. But I will not say with confidence that we're going to reach a deal until we're actually signing a negotiated settlement here," Vance said.

President Donald Trump offered an account of the details and timeline related to his decision to call off a planned attack on Iran this week, while setting a new deadline of next week for Iran to strike a deal or face strikes.

During an event showing the construction of the White House ballroom project on Tuesday, the president appeared to suggest that he had been “one hour away” from definitively ordering strikes Iran on Monday before he made the decision to delay the attacks at the request of allies in the region who said there has been progress with Iran peace talks.

"I was an hour away,” Trump said on Tuesday. “You're talking about yesterday? We were going to be striking very ... it would have been happening right now. Yeah, it was all done. The boats, the ships are all loaded. They're loaded to the brim, and we're all set to start,” Trump said.

But, the president said just moments later that he was “one hour away" from “making the decision” to carry out those strikes.

-ABC News' Michelle Stoddart and Isabella Murray

President Donald Trump said he was "an hour away" from striking Iran, saying the U.S. would have been striking "right now."

The ships are all "loaded" and ready to attack, Trump said during an event the White House Tuesday.

UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper warned Tuesday that "the world is sleepwalking into a global food crisis," saying that if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened "tens of millions of people" could go hungry.

The closure of that critical waterway to almost all ships has disrupted exports of large quantities of fertilizer products.

Earlier this month the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization warned that the war had created a global "scarcity" of fertilizer which would "lead to lower [crop] yields and tightening food supplies in the latter half of 2026 and into 2027."

The UK Foreign Office warned that "if global partners don’t get fertiliser moving" then vulnerable regions of the world will need "shipments of critical emergency aid...not just external investment and technology," it said in a press release.

Cooper said Iran had "hijacked" the critical international shipping lane.

"Iran’s continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz while the agriculture clock is ticking shows why we need urgent global pressure to get the Strait reopened, fertiliser and fuel moving and ease the costs of living pressures", Cooper said.

-ABC News' Tom Soufi Burridge