President Donald Trump said on Monday that Iran would not make the deal he thinks is needed to end a war with the U.S.and should surrender as talks between the countries remained stalled.
“They’re not going to make the kind of a deal that I feel is necessary. Look, we’re in there for one reason: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
Asked whether the U.S. was seeking to extend an interim deal with Iran, Trump said “no.”
The interim deal agreed to in June declared an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts”, but quickly unraveled, with Trump saying it was “over” on July 7 and Iran’s foreign ministry declaring it “suspended” a week later.
Under that memorandum of understanding, Iran and the U.S. committed to negotiating a final deal — covering broader issues such as the fate of Iran’s nuclear programme — in a maximum of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent. Monday marks 60 days since the MOU was signed.
Hours before, Trump told a Fox News reporter during a phone interview that Iran “should put up the white flag of surrender.”
Separately, Oman and Iran have been in talks to try to reach an agreement to restore commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which carried 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies before the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began in late February.
“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” Trump told Fox.
When asked later in the Oval Office if he was out of patience with Oman, Trump told reporters: “No, I don’t think they behaved very well, but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things.”
The dispute over control of the Strait of Hormuz has driven up fuel prices and put pressure on Trump to end a war that is unpopular at home ahead of the November midterm elections that will decide control of the U.S. Congress.
