US President Donald Trump said he would prefer to make a deal with Iran rather than “bombing the hell out of it,” in a media interview published Saturday, adding that Israel would not carry out a strike if there were an agreement.
“I would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear. I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it,” he told the New York Post aboard Air Force One on Friday. “They don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die.”
“If we made the deal, Israel wouldn’t bomb them,” he predicted, though he also said he would not discuss potential negotiations with Tehran.
Last week Trump denied the United States and Israel were planning to carry out a military strike on Iran, instead saying that he wanted to make a new nuclear deal with Tehran and that work on the potential pact should start immediately.
“In a way, I don’t like telling you what I’m going to tell them. You know, it’s not nice,” he told the Post. “I could tell what I have to tell them, and I hope they decide that they’re not going to do what they’re currently thinking of doing. And I think they’ll really be happy.”
The interview was published as the British Telegraph newspaper reported that top commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) told Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that Tehran needs nuclear weapons to counter “existential threats” from the West.
The commanders reportedly asked the ayatollah to revoke his long-standing fatwa, or religious edict, prohibiting atomic weapons, having made a U-turn since Trump won the presidential election in November.
“We have never been this vulnerable, and it may be our last chance to obtain one before it’s too late,” one official was quoted as telling The Telegraph.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Friday claimed his country was not seeking a nuclear weapon, a day after Trump called for a new agreement.
Noting the fatwa, Pezeshkian said that Tehran was not pursuing the bomb because “massacring innocent people is not acceptable in the doctrine of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Khamenei on Friday said that if Washington “threatens” Iran’s security, Tehran would “threaten them in return,” adding that negotiations with the US “are not intelligent, wise or honorable” after Trump floated the idea of nuclear talks.
Khamenei had noted that Trump in his previous term had unilaterally withdrawn from an earlier nuclear deal under which Iran drastically limited its enrichment of uranium and overall stockpile of the material, in exchange for the removal of crushing sanctions.
“The Americans did not uphold their end of the deal,” he said. “The very person who is in office today tore up the agreement. He said he would, and he did.”
Also in his interview with the Post, the US president revealed that he had spoken to Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the phone in an attempt to end the Ukraine war.
He said he’d “better not say” how many times the two leaders had spoken, but noted that he believes his Russian counterpart “does care” about deaths in the years-long war.
“He (Putin) wants to see people stop dying,” Trump told the New York Post.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday he could “neither confirm nor deny” reports of a conversation between Putin and Trump, Russian state news agency TASS reported.
The White House did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment outside business hours.
In late January, the Kremlin spokesperson had said that Putin was ready to hold a phone call with Trump and that Moscow was waiting for word from Washington.
On Friday, Trump said he would probably meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week to discuss the end of the war.
The war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, will mark its third anniversary on February 24. Thousands of people, the vast majority of them Ukrainian, have been killed during the conflict.
Trump told the New York Post that he has “always had a good relationship with Putin” and that he has a concrete plan to end the war. But he did not disclose further details.
“I hope it’s fast,” Trump said. “Every day people are dying. This war is so bad in Ukraine. I want to end this damn thing.”