US President Donald Trump indicated Friday that he was disinclined to ask Israel to halt its strikes against Iran, despite Tehran’s foreign minister asserting that his country would not hold nuclear talks with Washington as long as Israel’s offensive across the Islamic Republic continued.
“I think it’s very hard to make that request right now,” Trump told reporters. “If somebody is winning, it’s a little bit harder to do that [than] if somebody’s losing. But we’re ready, willing and able, and we’ve been speaking to Iran.”
“Israel is doing well, in terms of war, and… Iran is doing less well. It’s a little bit hard to get somebody to stop,” he added.
Earlier Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said there was no room for negotiations with the US “until Israeli aggression stops,” referencing the weeklong IDF strikes aimed at neutralizing threats posed by the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
But Araghchi later arrived in Geneva for talks with European foreign ministers, which Europe hoped could establish a path back to diplomacy. Trump was very dismissive of the European effort when asked about it by reporters upon landing in New Jersey.
“They didn’t help. Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this,” Trump claimed.
The US president said he will “always [be] a peacemaker,” but “sometimes you need some toughness to make peace.”
As for the prospect of sending in US ground troops to fight against Iran, Trump told reporters, “That’s the last thing you want to do.”
Asked about the two-week window he provided Thursday for making a decision on whether to join Israel in the war, Trump said he was giving Iran “a period of time.”
“I would say two weeks would be the maximum,” he added.
Pressed on concerns that the US is potentially being dragged into a conflict under false pretexts, Trump said in the case of the Iraq War over 20 years ago, there were no weapons of mass destruction. In the current scenario, however, Iran has amassed a “tremendous amount of material” and was “within a matter of weeks, or certainly within a matter of months [from being] able to have a nuclear weapon.”
