President Trump said on Friday that regime change in Iran “would be the best thing that could happen,” as he continued to threaten military action against the country.
“For 47 years, they’ve been talking and talking and talking,” he told reporters after visiting troops at Fort Bragg. “In the meantime, we’ve lost a lot of lives while they talk.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has called for new leadership in Iran, and The New York Times reported in January that he was mulling whether regime change would be a viable military option.
But his latest comments are, perhaps, Mr. Trump’s most overt endorsement of regime change, even as U.S. officials concede that ousting Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be much more complex than the operation that captured Nicolás Maduro, then the leader of Venezuela.
Still, officials have said that Mr. Trump had not made a final decision and was considering a range of military options.
The Trump administration has been steadily building up its military capabilities in the Middle East as Mr. Trump considers whether to strike the country again. Mr. Trump threatened last month to attack Iran if its government did not agree to a deal to curb its nuclear program.
For now, Mr. Trump said he preferred to see whether his administration can make a deal with Iran over its nuclear program.
But senior U.S. officials remain skeptical that the Iranians will agree to a deal that satisfies Mr. Trump, who has shown a growing impatience with the negotiations. This month, Omani officials mediated talks between Iran and a U.S. delegation that included Steve Witkoff,
the Middle East envoy; and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.
U.S. officials have said any deal with Iran needs to go beyond just its nuclear program and also address Iran’s ballistic missiles and its support for militant groups across the Middle East.
Mr. Trump has been weighing a range of military actions, including targeting Iran’s nuclear program and its ability to launch ballistic missiles. He is also considering sending American commandos to go after Iranian military targets, among other moves, the officials said.
To prepare, the Pentagon has been building up an “armada,” as Mr. Trump calls it, in the region. It includes the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, eight guided missile destroyers that can shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles, land-based ballistic missile defense systems and submarines that can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets in Iran.
And on Thursday, the crew of a second aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, was told it would leave the Caribbean, where the ship joined the U.S. operation last month to seize Mr. Maduro, and deploy to the Middle East as part of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign.
The president authorized U.S. strikes on nuclear sites in Iran in June, and he weighed attacking again amid widespread protests that broke out across Iran near the end of last year. The president abruptly ruled out strikes in mid-January, after the Iranian authorities said they had canceled hundreds of scheduled executions and Israel and Arab nations asked Mr. Trump to postpone any strikes.
But as diplomatic talks drag on, Mr. Trump has returned to threatening Iran.
“We have to make a deal,” he said on Thursday. “Otherwise it’s going to be very traumatic. Very traumatic.”
Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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