President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the Iranian regime has agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons in order to stop the U.S. military from striking the country.
“There won’t be any nuclear weapons,” Trump said at the White House, adding that Iran “has agreed to that.”
Trump added that “we’re in a good bargaining position” and said Iran is mostly “defenseless.”
“We’re way ahead of schedule, and again, they have no navy, they have no air force, or missile protection,” he said. Most of Tehran’s missile launches have been taken out by the U.S. military, he said.
The president spoke to reporters as Markwayne Mullin, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma, was sworn in on Tuesday as the new Homeland Security secretary.
Trump added
that Iranian officials are “talking to us and they’re talking sense,” saying
that it “starts with” them not having nuclear weapons. Other details about what
was discussed in talks with the regime were not provided by the president.
Senior
Israeli political sources in Jerusalem told Epoch Magazine Israel that Egypt,
Turkey, and Pakistan worked behind the scenes to mediate between Washington and Tehran, with Pakistan
serving as the lead intermediary.
Iranian
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s office said he has been discussing the war
this week with several counterparts. However, some Iranian officials issued
defiant statements in response to Trump’s comments about negotiations.
On Monday,
as Trump said the U.S. government is in negotiations with Iran, their
parliamentary speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, wrote in a post on X that no
talks were underway.
“No
negotiations have been held with the U.S., and fake news is used to manipulate
the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and
Israel are trapped,” he wrote on Monday.
The public
talk of negotiations briefly drove down oil prices and boosted stocks this week. But
that respite was short-lived, with the price of Brent crude, the international
standard, reaching over $100 a barrel Tuesday, which is up more than 30 percent
since the war started.
Since the
U.S.–Israel air strikes, the Strait of Hormuz, which connects oil-rich nations
around the Persian Gulf to the broader ocean, has effectively been shut down by
Iran.
The
stalemate over the waterway led Trump to warn Iran over the past weekend that the U.S. military
would launch strikes on Iranian power plants and other infrastructure if no
progress is made within 48 hours. On Monday, the administration said the U.S.
military would extend the deadline to five days.
That comes
as Israel said on Tuesday that it carried out an extensive series of strikes
targeting Iran “production sites.” In Tehran, a massive blast was heard in
northern neighborhoods and another in the city center.
Israel’s
military pounded the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, saying that it was
targeting infrastructure used by the Iran-linked Hezbollah terrorist group.
Iran also
fired at least 10 waves of missiles at Israel, and first responders said three
people were wounded in southern Israel, while four others suffered minor wounds
in Tel Aviv.
For some
time, Iran and the United States had been engaged in negotiations over Tehran’s
long-disputed nuclear program that Washington, its European allies, and the
United Nations say was being used to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels.
Iran has said it has the right to enrich uranium and has disputed that its
program is being used to produce weapons.
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