President Donald Trump has said Iran will not make the deal he considers necessary to end the war and should surrender, as talks between the two countries remain stalled (Geo News).
“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 US was seeking to extend the interim deal, he said “no.”
Hours earlier he told Fox News that Iran “should put up the white flag of surrender.”
The timing is not incidental. The interim memorandum agreed in June declared an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” and committed both sides to negotiating a final deal within a maximum of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent. Monday was day 60. The memorandum had already unravelled — Trump declared it “over” on July 7 and Iran’s foreign ministry called it “suspended” a week later.
He also turned on the mediator. Oman and Iran have been negotiating to restore commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which carried 20 per cent of the world’s oil and LNG before the attacks on Iran began in late February. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” Trump told Fox. Asked later whether he had lost patience with Oman, he said: “No, I don’t think they behaved very well, but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things.”
Turkiye is pushing the other way. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Trump to urge that diplomacy be kept alive, the Turkish presidency said (Geo News). “Erdogan stated that it is of great importance to make the utmost of diplomacy regarding the tensions between Iran and the United States, that we hope the talks will continue, and that Turkey will continue to support peace efforts.”
Turkiye, which has NATO’s second-largest army and borders Iran, has criticised the US and Israeli assault while condemning Iranian attacks on Gulf states and calling for the strait to reopen. It has kept contact with Washington, Tehran and the mediators — Pakistan and Qatar among them.
The dispute over Hormuz has pushed fuel prices up and increased pressure on Trump over a war that is unpopular at home before November’s midterm elections. He told Fox News the midterms were not affecting his strategy.
