Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Saturday that Tehran will not be bullied into negotiations, a day after US President Donald Trump said he had sent a letter to the country’s top authority to negotiate a nuclear deal.
In an interview with Fox Business, Trump said, “There are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal,” to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Trump said that while he would “rather negotiate a deal with Iran” to resolve the issue of its nuclear weapons program, “the other alternative is you have to do something, because Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
Trump said there will be “some interesting days ahead with Iran.”
“We are down to the final moments. We can’t let them have a nuclear weapon. Something is going to happen very soon,” Trump said. “I would rather have a peace deal than the other option, but the other option will solve the problem.”
In a meeting with senior Iranian officials, Khamenei said the aim of Washington’s offer for negotiations was to “impose their own expectations,” Iranian state media reported.
“The insistence of some bully governments on negotiations is not to resolve issues, but to dominate and impose their own expectations,” he said.
“Talks for them is a path to have new expectations, it is not only about Iran’s nuclear issue. Iran will definitely not accept their expectations.”
While expressing an openness to a deal with Tehran, Trump has reinstated a “maximum pressure” campaign that was applied during his first term to isolate Iran from the global economy and drive its oil exports to zero.
During his first 2017-2021 term as president, Trump withdrew the United States from a landmark deal between Iran and major powers that placed strict limits on Tehran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.
After Trump pulled out in 2018 and re-imposed sanctions, Iran breached and far surpassed those limits.
UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi has said time is running out for diplomacy to impose new restrictions on Iran’s activities, as Tehran continues to accelerate its enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade.
Tehran insists its nuclear work is solely for peaceful purposes.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told AFP on Friday that the country’s nuclear program cannot be destroyed in a military attack.
“Iran’s nuclear program cannot be destroyed through military operations… this is a technology that we have achieved, and the technology is in the brains and cannot be bombed,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of an Organisation of Islamic Cooperation meeting in Jeddah.
He also said an Israeli attack on Iran would set off a wider conflict in the Middle East. “I believe that if an attack on Iran were to take place, this attack could turn into a widespread fire in the region,” Araqchi added.
Meanwhile, Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani warned that an attack on Iran’s Gulf coast nuclear facilities would leave countries across the region without water.
In an interview with right-wing United States media personality Tucker Carlson, who is close to Trump, the premier said Doha had simulated the effects of an attack. The sea would be “entirely contaminated,” and Qatar would “run out of water in three days,” he said.
“No water, no fish, nothing… no life,” Sheikh Mohammed added.
Qatar, which sits 190 kilometers (120 miles) south of Iran, relies heavily on desalination for its water supply, as do other Gulf Arab countries in the arid desert region.
Iran has a nuclear power plant at Bushehr on the Gulf coast, though its uranium enrichment facilities, key to building atomic weapons, are located hundreds of kilometers inland.