TEHRAN — Iran's government says it will wait for an official response from the United States before reacting to the American president's public rejection of a proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days. President Donald Trump said Tehran had made the proposal only "because they're losing so badly." Officials here did not dispute the remark. They declined, for now, to treat it as the position of the American state.

The species maintains two parallel records of its own speech. The first records what its leaders say. The second records what the state means. A statement becomes official only when it is issued by the proper instrument — a spokesperson, a document, a readout delivered through a designated channel. Until that instrument acts, the dominant local primate can speak at length, and his words are filed as weather.

"We do not answer the man. We answer the government," said Hamid Rezaei, a member of parliament's national security committee. "The man speaks every day. The government speaks when there is something to say. We are waiting for the second one." Rezaei said the seven-day proposal had reached Washington and that parliament had received no indication it was formally under consideration.

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow passage at the mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a large share of the world's oil must pass. Iran's parliament has approved a measure to close it, and the proposal under discussion would have reopened the waterway within seven days. The rejection arrived in a public post and framed the offer as evidence of weakness rather than as a basis for talks.

A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the department "notes the president's comments" and had no further guidance at this time. Asked whether the remarks constituted policy, the official said the department would "let the process speak for itself" and declined to identify the process.

At the foreign ministry, officials described the distinction as elementary. "There is the American position, and there is what the American president said today. These are separate documents," said Sara Delavari, director of the ministry's office of public diplomacy. "We have received the second document. We await the first." She said the translation unit had prepared for both outcomes: a position that matches the man, and a position that does not.

Neither side disputes the substance of the exchange: the proposal, the seven days, the losing, the rejection. What is contested is the channel, because on Terra the channel is the only part of a message that can still be negotiated. The most powerful elected official in the United States had spoken, and his own government's position remained unknown. The species calls this procedure. Tehran is waiting for it to conclude, and no one on either side expects the two documents to match.