President Trump, in his first public comments on the Israeli strike against Iran, said that Tehran had brought the destruction on itself by failing to accept an offer that he and his envoy Steve Witkoff had put on the table about two weeks ago in nuclear talks.
The proposal would have eventually forced Iran to give up all uranium enrichment.
“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal,” he wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform, on Friday morning. “I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done.”
The negotiations had lasted only two months, and in recent weeks Mr. Trump had told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to hold off on any attack in order to let diplomacy play out. On Thursday afternoon, as Israel’s final attack preparations were underway, Mr. Trump told reporters, “I don’t want them going in” because “I think it would blow it” with the talks. (He immediately added that it “might help actually, but it could also blow it.”)
In his post, Mr. Trump suggested that some Iranian leaders who were opposed to a deal had been targeted in the Israeli attack, which killed several top Iranian military officials and at least two prominent nuclear scientists.
“Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!” Mr. Trump wrote.
During his first term, Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that was signed by President Barack Obama, deriding the agreement as “one-sided” and a “disaster.” It had allowed Iran to keep producing fuel at low levels, suitable for nuclear power plants but not for weapons — a position his own administration considered as recently as two months ago.
American and Iranian negotiators had been planning to meet on Sunday in Oman for a sixth round of talks. Those negotiations are now in limbo, with the Iranian government announcing on state television after the strikes on Friday morning that it would not participate in discussions with the United States on Sunday and until further notice.
Mr. Trump’s social media post attempted to put pressure on Iran to continue negotiating. “The next already planned attacks,” he wrote would be “even more brutal.”
He added: “Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire.” In his often-used capital letters, he concluded, “JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
The post Trump Says Iran ‘Must Make a Deal, Before There Is Nothing Left’ appeared first on New York Times.
