BIARRITZ, France _ President Donald Trump said Monday he wasn't seeking regime change in Iran, and is open to negotiating with the president of the Middle Eastern country that he's sanctioned and denounced for supporting terrorism around the region.
"Iran is a country of tremendous potential. We're not looking for leadership change," Trump said during a news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron on the final day of the G-7 summit here.
"I really believe Iran could be a great nation, but they can't have nuclear weapons," Trump said. The U.S. goals were for Iran to have "no nuclear weapons, no ballistic missiles" and "a longer period of time" than the 2015 nuclear agreement reached by former President Obama, which was a 10-year agreement.
The comment was a notable softening from Trump. Previously, administration officials have spelled out extensive demands for changes in Iran's policies and behavior.
Earlier on Monday, Trump had said it was "too soon" for Washington to enter talks with Tehran.
Macron, who has been trying to salvage the nuclear agreement and broker a meeting, said he hoped Trump could sit down with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in the coming weeks. Trump said he was open to meeting "if the circumstances are correct."
The news conference came on the final day of the G-7 meetings, where Trump sowed confusion about the status of his trade war with China even as he tried to reassure global markets by saying that Beijing was ready to restart negotiations.
And even as he insisted he was in sync with the other international leaders at the summit, Trump was the only one to skip a session focused on climate change, a problem he's downplayed or outright denied.
A day after he said he was second-guessing his escalation of the trade war with China, a comment that the White House quickly tried to walk back, Trump told reporters that Chinese officials had called Sunday night to say "they want to make a deal."
There was no confirmation from Chinese officials that such conversations took place, and Trump's version of events have often conflicted with those of other world leaders. Even though he presented the latest dialogue as a breakthrough that could lead to an agreement in days, talks between the U.S. and China were already scheduled to resume next month.
Days after Trump "ordered" U.S. businesses to leave China and sent the stock market into a nosedive, he showered praise on Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
"One of the reasons that he's a great leader, Xi, and one of the reasons China's a great country is they understand how life works," Trump said. "China called last night our top trade people and said, 'Let's get back to the table.' I have great respect for it. This is a very positive development for the world."
Pressed by reporters on whether a call from the Chinese actually had taken place the way Trump had said, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin demurred.
"There were discussions that went back and forth, and let's just leave it at that," Mnuchin said.
Speaking to reporters at the outset of his first bilateral meeting of the day with Egypt's President, Abdel Fattah Sisi, Trump also claimed that Macron "asked me for approval" before inviting Iran's foreign minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, to Biarritz to talk on the sidelines of the G-7 and that he had "a very good relationship" with France's president.
"He asked me. I don't consider that disrespectful at all," Trump said.
That contradicted a White House official who told reporters Sunday that the U.S. delegation had not been warned about Zarif's arrival. "That was with great respect. I spoke to President Macron yesterday. I knew everything he was doing."
Asked about the climate meeting that he missed, Trump suggested it hadn't happened yet, saying, "We're having it in a little while."
He continued to insist that he was anything but an outlier among the leaders of the world's most powerful industrialized democracies, while complaining about media reports focused on his disruptions at past summits and on Macron's efforts to corral him at this year's G-7.
On Sunday, Trump trumpeted a tentative trade agreement with Japan and on Monday grumbled to Sisi that the American media weren't paying enough attention to it.
"When we make a really big and really great trade deal like with Japan, the media never writes about it," he said to the Egyptian president, who sat quietly for 15 minutes as Trump took a number of questions from U.S. reporters. "They only like to write about the bad things."
The agreement in principle with Japan, reached Sunday, has yet to be finalized. And Abe's comments about the deal were noticeably more conditional _ and less celebratory _ than Trump's. But the president said he was confident Japan would ultimately agree to the deal, stating that his ability to impose additional tariffs on Japanese auto exports to the U.S. gives him leverage.
"We have the cards," Trump said.
That familiar bluster came after two days of rebukes, some more explicit than others, by G-7 leaders frustrated with the impact of Trump's trade wars on the global economy. Even British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Trump ally, offered a public, if gently worded, reminder that he supported free trade.
In the one-on-one meetings that are a prominent feature of the G-7 schedule, Trump has stressed areas of agreement, often overstating the alignment between him and his counterparts while mostly ignoring evidence of diverging views.
He claimed Sunday to be "on the same page" as Abe about North Korea's recent tests of short-range missiles, even as Abe called them a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions while Trump refused to accept that judgment.
Trump also told reporters that some G-7 members agreed with his inclination to reinstate Russia to the group, although he declined to say which ones. Other leaders have indicated publicly and privately to Trump that they do not intend to allow Russia back in. Moscow was expelled from the G-7 after its 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday there should be talks between Ukraine and Russia to resolve the conflict there.
"We have to try to bring this forward in the next few months," she said, adding that "it's a big problem, and there are enough problems in the world."
