President Trump on Sunday threatened to bomb Iran if a deal isn’t reached on the country’s civilian nuclear program.
“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before,” Trump told NBC News in a phone interview.
The president has made similar threats toward Iran, but Sunday’s marked the most explicit one yet, and it comes as the US is sending more bombers to the region and pounding Yemen with daily airstrikes. Trump also said the US could hit Iran with “secondary tariffs” if a deal isn’t reached.
Trump’s threat comes after US intelligence agencies said in their annual threat assessment that there’s no evidence Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon or that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reversed his 2003 fatwah that banned the production of weapons of mass destruction.
Iran recently responded to a letter Trump sent to Khamenei proposing nuclear talks and giving Tehran a two-month deadline to reach a deal. A US official told Axios that the deployment of US B-2 bombers to Diego Garcia was “not disconnected” from that deadline.
Iranian officials have repeatedly rejected the idea of direct talks with the US in the face of Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure campaign” but have left the door open to indirect negotiations.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Sunday that Iran’s response to Trump’s letter made indirect talks possible but that the US’s behavior would determine how things would move forward.
“While Iran’s response rules out the possibility of direct talks between the two sides, it states that the path for indirect negotiations remains open,” Pezeshkian said. Iranian officials have been noting the fact that Trump was the one who tore up the 2015 nuclear deal by reimposing sanctions on Iran.
“As we have stated before, Iran has never closed the channels of indirect communication. In its response, Iran reaffirmed that it has never shied away from engaging in negotiations, but rather, it has just been the United States’ repeated violations of agreements and commitments that have created problems on this path,” Pezeshkian said.
“It’s the behavior of the Americans that will determine whether the negotiations can move forward,” the Iranian leader added. In his interview with NBC, Trump said that US and Iranian officials were talking but didn’t elaborate further.
