U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he wanted to end the war with the Islamic Republic of Iran “very quickly,” telling lawmakers that the regime “wants to make a deal so badly.”
“They’re tired of this—this should have happened for 47 years, somebody should have done something about it, and it’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen fast,” the president said in remarks at the White House’s annual Congressional Picnic.
Oil prices will plummet and Tehran “won’t have a nuclear weapon,” Trump stressed. “Hopefully we’re going to get it done in a very nice manner.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Vice President JD Vance told reporters at the White House briefing room on Tuesday that allowing the Islamic regime to obtain a nuclear bomb “would really be the first domino” and set off a global arms race.
“As the father of three young kids, I don’t want them to inherit a world where 20 additional regimes, half of them very dangerous and very sympathetic to terrorists, have nuclear weapons,” he said.
Vance stressed that there were only “two pathways” to break the standoff with Iran: diplomatic talks conducted “in good faith” or renewed U.S. military action as part of “Operation Epic Fury.”
Vance said that while U.S. negotiators made “a lot of progress,” Washington doesn’t know whether Iran will agree to its terms until the two sides put “pen to paper on signing a deal.”
Trump in a Monday press conference provided more details on his announcement that military action against Iran planned for Tuesday had been delayed.
“I was asked by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and some others if we could put it off for two or three days, a short period of time, because they think that they are getting very close to making a deal. And if we can do that where there’s no nuclear weapon going into the hands of Iran, I think and if they’re satisfied, we will be probably satisfied also,” the president told reporters.
“It’s a very positive development, but we’ll see whether or not it amounts to anything. We’ve had periods of time where we’ve had, we thought pretty much getting close to making a deal and didn’t work out, but this is a little bit different,” Trump said. “Now we were ready to go tomorrow very big and not something I wanted to do, but we have no choice because we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Monday that Tehran would not relinquish the “legal rights of the people and the country” even as it engages in diplomacy with Washington.
Reuters, citing Iranian state media on Tuesday, reported that the Iranian regime’s latest proposal demands an end to hostilities on all fronts, including against Iran’s Hezbollah terror proxy in Lebanon; the withdrawal of U.S. forces from areas near Iran; and reparations for damage caused by the United States and Israel during the war. The Islamist regime is also seeking the lifting of sanctions, the release of frozen funds and an end to the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports.
The news agency noted that the new Iranian proposal appears to have changed little from its previous offer, which Trump previously rejected as “garbage.”
