Washington: US President Donald Trump said Iran agreed never to have a nuclear weapon and sent a “significant prize” related to the Strait of Hormuz even as he declared victory in the three-week war.
Speaking to reporters at the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump claimed Iran was keen to “make a deal” and indicated that Vice President J D Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy on the Middle East Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner were leading the negotiations.
The President said that the current Iranian leadership had already undergone significant changes.
The comments came ahead of Trump’s newly-issued Friday deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump on Monday said he was postponing the major attacks he’d threatened on Tehran’s energy infrastructure for five days because of productive discussions with Iran over the weekend.
Iran, meanwhile, has insisted that no talks have taken place.
Trump still has not identified who the U.S. is negotiating with in Iran, though he has said it is not Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s new supreme leader.
“We killed all their leadership. Then they met to choose new leaders and we killed all of them. Now, we have a new group and we can easily do that. But let’s see how they turn out,” Trump said.
“We have really regime change,” the president continued. “This is a change in the regime. Because the leaders are all very different than the ones that we started off with.”
Trump also revealed more key players in negotiations, saying on Tuesday that Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are involved — along with Steve Witkoff, White House special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.
“We’re in negotiations right now,” Trump said. Trump said he was personally involved as well.
When asked what the turning point was to make him pursue diplomatic talks after saying just days ago that the U.S. did not want a ceasefire, Trump replied: “They’re talking to us and they’re making sense.”
Pressed on whether he trusted Iranian negotiators, Trump said, “I don’t trust anybody” before going on to discuss the gift he said he received from Iran.
“They’re going to make a deal. They did something yesterday that was amazing, actually,” Trump said. “They gave us a present. The present arrived today. It was a very big present, worth a tremendous amount of money.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. military sees itself as “part of this negotiation as well.”
“We negotiate with bombs,” Hegseth said. “You have a choice. As we loiter over the top of Tehran, as the president talked about your future, the president has made it clear that you will not have a nuclear weapon. The War Department agrees, our job is to ensure that, and so we’re keeping our hand on that throttle as long and hard as is necessary to ensure the interests of the United States of America are achieved on that battlefield.”
Trump appeared to joke that Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine did not want the conflict to end.
“They were not interested in settlement. They were interested in just winning this thing,” Trump said.
Despite Trump’s touting of progress in talks, the U.S. is continuing to send thousands more US Marines and several Navy ships to the Middle East, and the Pentagon is seeking $200 billion in supplemental funding.
Strikes continued across the Middle East on Tuesday amid uncertainty over the state of talks between the U.S. and Iran.
The Trump administration has not confirmed if and when in-person talks will take place between U.S. and Iranian officials in the coming days.
“These are sensitive diplomatic discussions, and the United States will not negotiate through the press. This is a fluid situation, and speculation about meetings should not be deemed as final until they are formally announced by the White House,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement provided to ABC News.
Pakistan has positioned itself as a mediator between the U.S. and Iran.
A Pakistani official familiar with the negotiations told ABC News that there are “several proposals” floating around regarding the next steps for talks and said an in-person meeting in Islamabad is on the table.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday, in a social media post, offered to play host to talks between the U.S. and Iran to bring an end to the conflict. Trump reshared the prime minister’s post from his own Truth Social account.
The Pakistani official said Turkey and Egypt are also helping to facilitate the talks between the U.S. and Iran.
The official said the talks would likely take place within the next five days in accordance with Trump’s social media post — suggesting military strikes on Iranian power plants were “paused” for the next five days as Tehran and Washington engage in diplomatic negotiations. The official cautioned nothing is final as of yet.
A spokesperson for the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington declined to comment. The Egypt and Turkish embassies have not responded to requests for comment. Turkey’s foreign minister said last Thursday that his country was talking to both the U.S. and Iran to understand where the two nations stand.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said he had spoken with Trump, and said Trump believes there “is an opportunity to leverage the tremendous achievements we have attained with the U.S. military to realize the war’s objectives in an agreement — an agreement that will safeguard our vital interests.”
In the meantime, Netanyahu said Israel will “continue to strike both in Iran and in Lebanon. We are crushing the missile program and the nuclear program, and continue to inflict severe blows on Hezbollah.”
President Trump earlier Monday said that Israel would be “very happy” when asked if he believed Israel would abide by a negotiated peace deal.
