President Trump on Wednesday held the door open for more negotiations with Iran but insisted he did not feel any political pressure to make a deal to end the unpopular three-month war and lower gas prices.
At the same time, Mr. Trump renewed his threats to strike Iran again if it does not agree to his terms for a peace deal.
“They’re negotiating on fumes, but we’ll see what happens,” the president said at a White House cabinet meeting, referring to Iran’s faltering economy and its battered military. “Maybe we have to go back and finish it. Maybe we don’t.”
He rejected any suggestion that the looming midterm elections and high gas prices stemming from Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz had increased the pressure on him to strike an agreement that would reopen the waterway to oil tankers and other commercial ship traffic.
“I don’t care about the midterms — look what happened last night,” he said.
The comment was an apparent reference to the victory in Texas on Tuesday night by a Trump-backed candidate, Ken Paxton, over a longtime Republican stalwart, Senator John Cornyn, in a primary runoff election.
As for gas prices, which hit a four-year high in the United States over Memorial Day weekend, Mr. Trump dismissed the notion that they were adding to the sense of urgency he felt in the pursuit of a deal. “The primary urgency is that we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Trump said. He predicted that prices were “going to come down fast.”
Mr. Trump’s vacillation between hope for negotiations and threats of more strikes came on a day when Israel ramped up its offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, further eroding a tenuous cease-fire in that country and potentially complicating a peace agreement with Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor.
Iran and the United States have offered conflicting accounts of what the outlines of a peace deal might look like, after weeks of diplomacy involving mediators from Pakistan, Qatar and Oman.
Iranian state television reported on Wednesday that it had obtained an “initial, unofficial” framework for an agreement. The White House roundly dismissed the report, calling it a “complete fabrication,” and Mr. Trump said several of the terms it outlined would be unacceptable.
Under the purported framework, Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial ships, but it would continue to control the strait in cooperation with Oman, and ship traffic would return to return to prewar levels within a month of the deal’s approval. In return, it said, the United States would lift its naval blockade on ships entering and leaving Iranian ports
The Iranian report also said that the United States would withdraw an unspecified number of troops from “areas surrounding Iran” without specifying whether that would apply to American military bases in the Persian Gulf and Iraq.
The reported draft made no mention of some of the most contentious issues in the negotiations, including the future of Iran’s nuclear program and its stockpile of enriched uranium.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio reiterated at the cabinet meeting on Wednesday that any deal must ensure that Iran cannot develop a nuclear weapon. “I think there’s been some progress and some interest,” he said, “and we’ll see over the next few hours and days whether progress could be made.”
Mr. Rubio also alluded to the possibility of more strikes on Iran, telling the president, who was seated next to him, that “you have other options available to you if that doesn’t work.”
Mr. Trump dismissed the idea of Iran and Oman sharing control of the strait, saying the waterway must be “open for everybody.” Tehran has said it plans to charge fees on ships passing through the waterway from now on.
“Nobody’s going to control it,” Mr. Trump said. “We’ll watch over it.”
He warned Oman, a U.S. ally, not to get involved in management of the strait.
“Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up,” Mr. Trump said. “They understand that.”
His warning came after a flare-up in hostilities between United States and Iran this week, combined with the intensifying Israeli combat in Lebanon, threatened to set back diplomatic talks.
On Monday, American forces targeted missile launch sites in southern Iran and sank two Iranian speedboats that U.S. officials said were trying to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. military characterized the strikes as defensive.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has vowed a “decisive reciprocal response” to any violations of the cease-fire reached last month. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, suggested that his country could renew strikes on U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf.
Iran has argued that any peace agreement should apply to the war in Lebanon, as well, but U.S. and Israeli officials have described that as a separate matter. The Israeli military said on Wednesday that it had struck more than 150 targets in Lebanon associated with Hezbollah over the past day and that it had issued evacuation orders for Nabatieh and Tyre, two of the largest cities in the country’s south.
It was the second day of heavy Israeli military operations in the country. On Tuesday, Israeli strikes killed at least 31 people in Lebanon, including four children, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Despite a cease-fire in Lebanon that took effect in April, Hezbollah and Israel have continued to trade attacks, deepening fears that the truce could collapse altogether.
On Wednesday, Hezbollah carried out more drone and rocket attacks against Israeli troops in southern Lebanon and continued to fire across the border into Israel.
Hezbollah said its fighters were also engaged in close combat with Israeli forces in Zawtar al-Sharqiyah, a town that is about six miles from the Israeli border and just north of the Litani River. The clashes signaled that Israeli troops were advancing beyond what they call the “forward defense line,” an area extending several miles into southern Lebanon that Israel has occupied since it invaded in March.
Sanam Mahoozi, Alan Yuhas and Leo Sands.
Max Bearak is a correspondent for The Times focusing on breaking and international news.
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