US President Donald Trump has announced a meeting between a delegation from his administration and Iran next week to resume the interrupted nuclear negotiations, just five days after bombing Iran's nuclear facilities last weekend. The Republican has even suggested the possibility that Tehran would"sign an agreement" at that meeting to renounce uranium enrichment, an aspect that Tehran has so far refused to commit to.
"We're going to talk to Iran next week. We may sign an agreement. I don't know," Trump revealed during his press conference at the close of the NATO summit held Tuesday and Wednesday in The Hague. The president did not specify where the talks would take place. Previous rounds had taken place in Oman without achieving significant progress: Washington demanded an absolute end to Iranian uranium enrichment; Tehran, which maintains that its activities in this area are not intended to produce weapons, refused to comply.
The agenda for the meeting in The Hague did not address the crisis that erupted when Israel attacked military and nuclear targets in Iran on the 13th. Tehran responded to the attacks with missile launches, and Trump eventually ordered the bombing of the nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. But although it wasn't on the official agenda, the US president brought up the crisis in almost every public statement he made since leaving for The Hague.
The comments became especially frequent—and defensive—after the US press published a preliminary Pentagon report suggesting that the US attack did not completely destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure, as Trump had claimed, and that the blow suffered by Tehran will only delay that country's nuclear program by a few months.
In his press conference, Trump reiterated that US military action destroyed the three facilities attacked:"I said Iran will not have nuclear weapons, and we blew them up. To the kingdom of heaven."
For this reason, he asserted, he"doesn't care whether there is an agreement or not" in the imminent negotiations he has announced."The only thing we would ask for is what we asked for before: no nuclear weapons. But we have destroyed the nuclear weapons" in Iran, he insisted again. Visibly upset by media reports about the preliminary report, Trump read a report from the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission stating that Fordow, the main and most heavily protected Iranian facility, was"totally pulverized" by the bombing. At the president's urging, the White House also distributed the text to its email lists.
Regional events had already dominated Trump's remarks during a meeting with the Alliance's Secretary General, Mark Rutte, immediately before the start of the summit. During that meeting, the Republican even evoked the US dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, comparing it to what happened in Iran and claiming that the weekend bombing halted the conflict between Israel and Iran.
"I don't want to use the Hiroshima example, I don't want to use the Nagasaki example, but it was basically the same. Those ended a war, [the bombing of Iran] ended a war," he argued.
The Iranians"are going to take decades" to rebuild the facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, the US president maintained."I don't think they want to do it again," he added, referring to whether Tehran might try to resume its nuclear activities."The last thing they want to do is go back to enriching" uranium, he concluded.
