Washington will accept nothing but “total dismantlement” of Iran’ nuclear capabilities, U.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview last week with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that was aired on Sunday.
The president said he might be “open” to conversations about Iran’s pursuit of civilian nuclear energy, but added that he is skeptical with regard to Tehran’s need for non-military nuclear energy.
“There’s a new theory going out there that Iran would be allowed to have civilian, meaning, to make electricity—but I say, you know, they have so much oil, what do they need it for?” Trump told NBC.
But “people are talking about that and this is something that’s really pretty new in the dialogue … and my inclination is to say: ‘what do you need that for? You have a lot of oil,’” he continued.
“I’d be open to hearing it … civilian energy, it’s called … but often civilian energy leads to military wars, and we don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon,” the U.S. leader stressed.
“It’s a very simple deal. I want Iran to be really successful, really great, really fantastic. The only thing they can’t have is a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Following the interview, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee tweeted, “For those who fear [Trump] has changed his position on Iran, hear directly from HIM—not fake news from NYT or WAPO.”
Benny Gantz, who leads the opposition National Unity Party, told JNS at the Knesset in Jerusalem on Monday afternoon that the regime “should be dismantled of the processes that took her in the direction of military nuclear capacity.
“This is impossible for the entire world to allow fundamentalistic regime to possess military nuclear capacity,” he said, speaking at his party’s faction meeting on Monday afternoon. “And you know, when they enriched, they didn’t enrich to 3.5% or whatever. They went all the way up to 90%.
“So what is it for?” asked Gantz. “They are entitled to have something else [likely a reference to a civilian program—A.B.], and they need to allow a total inspection all over Iran every time, any time that they want, with zero warning to every place.”
The politician noted that it is a “global interest” to prevent the Islamic Republic from building nuclear weapons that could threaten both the United States and Israel.
“There are two ways. One is these negotiations that we are seeing now between the American and the Iranians, and the other one is fight. We are ready for the fight. Let’s see what happens,” concluded Gantz.
Ahead of the fourth round of talks between Washington and Tehran, which were set to have happened on Saturday in Rome, the Islamic Republic postponed its participation in the negotiations.
“U.S. sanctions on Iran during the nuclear talks are not helping the sides to resolve the nuclear dispute through diplomacy,” an unnamed senior official in Tehran said of his country’s decision to cancel the negotiations, according to Reuters.
“Depending on the U.S. approach, the date of the next round of talks will be announced,” the official stated, according to the wire agency’s report.
Oman, which hosted two previous sessions of the U.S.-Iran talks in Muscat, had said on Thursday that the next scheduled round of talks would be rescheduled for “logistical reasons.”
Earlier on Thursday, Trump warned that all purchases of Iranian oil must stop, threatening to impose sanctions on “any country or person who buys ANY AMOUNT of OIL or PETROCHEMICALS.”
“ALERT: All purchases of Iranian oil, or petrochemical products, must stop, NOW!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. Anyone who does business with Tehran “will not be allowed to do business with the United States of America in any way, shape, or form,” he added.
Speaking at the JNS International Policy Summit last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel would only agree to a nuclear deal with Iran that eliminates Tehran’s capacity to enrich uranium.
The only way to prevent the Islamic Republic from building a nuclear weapon is to dismantle “all the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program,” he said, adding, “That is the deal.”
Israel, he continued, “cannot live with anything short of that—anything short of that could bring you the opposite result, because Iran will say, all right, I won’t enrich, wait, run out the clock, wait for another president, do it again.” This, he said, was “unacceptable.”