President Donald Trump said Saturday he believes Iran is negotiating ‘seriously’ with the U.S., stressing that he hopes an ‘acceptable’ deal can be brokered.
The president’s comments were made as he reportedly weighs options on a possible military strike on Iran amid widespread protests and a violent crackdown in the country.
When asked by a reporter aboard Air Force One whether he had decided on a strike against Iran, Trump responded, ‘I certainly can’t tell you that.’
‘But we do have very big, powerful ships heading in that direction,’ he added. ‘I hope they negotiate something that’s acceptable.’
The president then sidestepped a question about whether Tehran would be emboldened if the U.S. opted not to launch strikes on Iran, saying, ‘Some people think that. Some people don’t.’
‘You could make a negotiated deal that would be satisfactory with no nuclear weapons,’ Trump said. ‘They should do that, but I don’t know that they will. But they are talking to us. Seriously talking to us.’
Trump has said the U.S. will not share military plans with Gulf allies while negotiating with Iran, even as U.S. naval forces surge into the region.
Speaking with Fox News Channel senior White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich on Saturday, Trump said, ‘We can’t tell them the plan. If I told them the plan, it would be almost as bad as telling you the plan — it could be worse, actually.’
‘But, look, the plan is that [Iran is] talking to us, and we’ll see if we can do something,’ Trump continued. ‘Otherwise, we’ll see what happens. … We have a big fleet heading out there, bigger than we had — and still have, actually — in Venezuela.’
On Sunday, the speaker of Iran’s parliament said the Islamic Republic now considers all European Union militaries to be terrorist groups after the bloc declared the country’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terror group over its crackdown on nationwide protests.
Iran again invoked a 2019 law to declare other nations’ militaries terrorist groups following the United States’ designation of the Guard as a terror organization that year.
The announcement by Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander, comes as the Islamic Republic also planned live-fire military drills for Sunday and Monday in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil trade passes.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.