President Donald Trump on Thursday said he’ll decide on whether to order U.S. warplanes to strike Iranian nuclear facilities within the next two weeks depending on whether or not Tehran engages in talks over ending their nuclear weapons program.
In statement relayed through White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Trump said: “ Based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.”
The president’s latest pronouncement comes just a day after he told reporters that he’d received outreach from Iranian leaders, who he said had expressed interest in coming to Washington for direct negotiations.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump said Iranian negotiators should have accepted an agreement his negotiators had put forth during talks that took place over the last two months, but expressed hope that there could be further talks despite the ratcheted-up hostilities in the days since Israel launched a military operation to take out much of Iran’s nuclear research and military capabilities.
“They should have made the deal. I had a great deal for them. They should have made that deal 60 days. We talked about it, and in the end, they decided not to do it, and now they wish they did it, and they want to meet, but it's, you know, late to meet, but they want to meet, and they want to come to the White House. They'll even come to the White House. So we'll see,” Trump said.
Asked to clarify the circumstances under which such talks could take place, Leavitt told reporters she would not “get into the reasoning and the rationale” behind Trump’s statement, nor would she say whether any communications between Washington and Tehran are happening directly or through intermediaries. She did, however, exhort Americans to “trust in President Trump.”
She later added that any agreement reached to stave off U.S. airstrikes would “absolutely not” permit Tehran to retain the capacity to enrich uranium in any form, echoing the terms of what was proposed during talks between Iranian officials and Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, earlier this month.
Trump’s promise of a decision within the next two weeks is the latest in a series of situations in which he has promised diplomatic or other results within 14 days before extending that deadline, such as when he told reporters last month that he would know whether Russian president Vladimir Putin would be willing to end his country’s three-year-old war against Ukraine “in about two weeks.”
But Leavitt claimed the current circumstances are “very, very different” from the situation in Ukraine while stressing that Trump is “peacemaker-in-chief” who “is always interested in a diplomatic solution to the problems in the global conflicts in this world.”
“If there's a chance for diplomacy, the President's always going to grab it, but he's not afraid to use strength as well,” he said.
The president is understood to have already green-lit a plan for U.S. warplanes to drop so-called “bunker buster” bombs onto Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility, which is buried deep within a mountain near the city of Qom, but held off on final approval of the airstrikes in hopes that the threat of American involvement would bring Iranian negotiators back to the table.
“I have ideas on what to do but I haven’t made a final – I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.
The new timeline for U.S. involvement in Israel’s week-old war against Iran comes as Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, is set to sit down with his British, French and German counterparts along with European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas in Geneva on Friday.
Those talks would be the first between Iran and Western officials since Israel launched a what it called a preemptive attack on Iran last week.
Separately, Araqchi has spoken by phone with Witkoff, the New York real estate developer and longtime friend of Trump who has served as the president’s roving diplomat since he returned to the White House in January. Araqchi reportedly told Witkoff that Tehran would not engage in talks with the U.S. unless Israel halts attacks.
At present, Iran shows little sign of backing down and continued its missile assault on southern Israel overnight, causing “extensive damage” to a major hospital, the Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheba. Israel does not appear to be interested in easing the tensions following that strike, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz calling supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "the modern-day Hitler” after the missile strike.
“A dictator like Khamenei, who heads a country like Iran and has made the destruction of the State of Israel his declared goal, this horrific goal of destroying Israel, cannot be allowed to continue or materialize,” Katz said.
While Trump’s new timeline may give new hope to the possibility of a diplomatic resolution, American diplomats have already evacuated from the region, and earlier this week U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee issued an “urgent notice” for Americans in Israel to make evacuation plans and reach out to the State Department for information on flights and cruise ship departures.
With additional reporting by agencies
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