Donald Trump has said the next 10 days will decide if the US strikes Iran or agrees a nuclear deal with the Islamic republic, as Washington steps up the deployment of a large military force to the Middle East.
As tensions mount between the two countries over Iran’s nuclear programme, the US president addressed his so-called “Board of Peace” in Washington on Thursday, saying: “Maybe we’re going to make a deal [with Tehran]. You’re going to be finding out over the next, probably 10 days.”
He added that “we have peace in the Middle East right now ... and one of the keys to it” was sending B-2 bombers into Iran in June, in a reference to Washington’s strikes against Iranian nuclear sites during Israel’s war against the Islamic republic last year.
Trump said the US assault “totally decimated [Iran’s] nuclear potential”.
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“Now we may have to take it a step further or we may not,” he said. “They can’t have a nuclear weapon. Very simple. They can’t have, you can’t have peace in the Middle East if they have a nuclear weapon.”
The US president has previously given similar timelines only to act far sooner than they indicated. He told Iran on June 19th last year that he would decide whether to join Israel’s attack on the country “within the next two weeks” – but authorised bombing three days later.
On Thursday, he said of Iran: “They cannot continue to threaten the stability of the entire region, and they must make a deal,” warning that in the absence of a nuclear agreement “bad things will happen”.
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The US has been sending additional military assets towards the region in recent days after Trump ordered one of the biggest build-ups in the area since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
US media this week quoted US officials saying the military has the ability to strike Iran as early as this weekend if Trump decides to order an attack.
The military build-up has continued as the US held two rounds of indirect talks with Iran over its nuclear programme. After the latest negotiations in Geneva on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said there had been “a little bit of progress made, but we’re still very far apart on some issues”.
Trump has been threatening to attack Iran since it brutally cracked down on mass anti-regime protests last month, killing thousands of people.
Last June, the US briefly joined Israel’s 12-day war against the Islamic republic to bomb Iran’s main nuclear facilities. Israel degraded Iran’s military capabilities during that war, but Tehran is thought to have been rebuilding its missile capacity. After Tuesday’s talks in Geneva, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said there had been “good progress” in the negotiations. But he also cautioned that this did not mean there would be an agreement soon.
A US official also said progress had been made and that Iran would come back in two weeks with “detailed proposals to address some of the open gaps in our position”.
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