Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, President Trump said he would not rule anything out, but that he prefers not to meet Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the sidelines of next week’s UN General Assembly.
Trump had been angling for a meeting with Rouhani for months, and had recently suggested the general assembly would be a good place for that to happen, with Rouhani being in the US for that. The shift seems to have coincided with US allegations that Iran had attacked Saudi Arabia.
As far as not meeting goes, Iran seems as fine with that as Trump does. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told state TV that all top officials unanimously agree that there will be no meetings with US officials.
Khamenei added that if the US returned to the 2015 nuclear deal, then multilateral talks could happen with all parties of the deal, but that bilateral talks are simply not under consideration.
Iranian officials are tying this to the US “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, and have long seen Trump’s offers for talks as insincere, and aiming to continue an information warfare.
Well, well, another Trump reversal…
What a surprise…
It apparently doesn’t occur to him that if he “doesn’t want a new war”, that he *might* – just *might” – want to actually *do* something like, oh, I don’t know, meet with an actual live Iranian when the opportunity is, you know, *handed* to him by events he’s going to attend *anyway*…
But, no, we’re supposed to *assume* that just because he (allegedly) “doesn’t want a new war” that he’s going to actually take some real steps to prevent it…other than tweeting about what he “wants”, that is…