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US President Donald Trump said on Friday that Iran will not be given time to develop a nuclear weapon and warned that a resolution will come “one way or the other,” suggesting the outcome could be peaceful or violent.
“There’s not plenty of time,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier. “We’re going to have a solution one way or the other. It’s either going to be violent or non-violent. And I far prefer non-violent.”
“I don’t want it to be a violent thing, but they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon,” he added. “I know so many Iranians from New York, from Washington, from a different place. These are great people. You know, they have to view them as people.”
Trump said Iran appears interested in engaging. “Iran wants to trade with us, okay, if you can believe that. And I’m okay with it. I’m using trade to settle scores and to make peace,” he said. “I’ve told Iran, we make a deal, you're going to be really... you’re going to be very happy.”
He also questioned why Iran would pursue nuclear energy given its vast oil reserves. “When you have unlimited amounts of oil and gas, why are you putting up nuclear civil?” he said. “If you’re sitting on one of the largest piles of oil in the world, why?”
Trump says Iran got US proposal
Earlier in the day, Trump told reporters that Iran had received a formal US proposal for a nuclear agreement and warned Tehran not to delay. “They have a proposal. More importantly, they know they have to move quickly or something bad—something bad's going to happen,” he said.
Axios reported Thursday that the written proposal was delivered during the fourth round of indirect talks between US and Iranian officials last Sunday in Muscat, Oman. The document, carried by White House envoy Steve Witkoff, reportedly outlines terms for a monitored civilian nuclear program.
According to the report, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi took the proposal back to Tehran for review by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials. U.S. and diplomatic sources described the offer as the first formal one from the Trump administration since talks began in April.
Iran, however, denied receiving any proposal. Araghchi wrote on X that no such document had been delivered and reaffirmed Iran’s position on uranium enrichment.
“The messaging we—and the world—continue to receive is confusing and contradictory,” Araghchi said. “Mark my words: there is no scenario in which Iran abandons its hard-earned right to enrichment for peaceful purposes.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking Thursday from Turkey, said diplomacy remains on the table but emphasized that the decision ultimately lies with Iran’s Supreme Leader.
“I hope he chooses the path of peace and prosperity, not a destructive path,” Rubio said.
Sebastian Gorka, an aide to US President Trump, warned of "catastrophic consequences" for Iran's leadership if nuclear talks fail, saying the United States will not tolerate Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
"The message is very clear. We will not permit Iran to maintain a nuclear weapons program,” Gorka, the National Security Council’s director of counterterrorism, told Iran International.
“And the president has likewise made clear, we will not permit Iran to continue to be the largest state sponsor of terrorism, and to fund and train and direct proxies all around the region,” he added.
"Those two things will end, or as the president has made clear, there will be catastrophic consequences for the dictatorship in Tehran."
US President Donald Trump’s team is showing flexibility on the issue of low-level uranium enrichment as part of a potential deal with Iran, Politico reported Friday, citing two unnamed European officials and a former Trump administration official.
“Trump has been led to believe that low-level enrichment isn’t a threat – this is the compromise John Kerry made in the JCPOA,” the former official was quoted as saying, referring to the 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated under former president Barack Obama.
Iran’s outreach to European powers has divided Tehran’s political commentators over whether engaging France, Germany and Britain serves any real purpose amid the Islamic Republic's talks with Washington.
Senior diplomats from Iran and the three European signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal met in Istanbul on Friday in what appears to be Tehran’s attempt to prevent a "snapback" of the UN sanctions that were suspended for ten years as part of that deal.
But the initiative is being questioned—somewhat surprisingly—by voices long known for advocating diplomacy, such as former lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh.
“There is no point in holding talks with Europeans. Iran’s only solution is to continue negotiations with the United States,” he told the conservative Nameh News on Friday
“Europe’s influence will remain insignificant as long as Trump is the President of the United States.”
Missed chances
A former head of parliament’s foreign policy committee, Falahatpisheh argued that Iran’s recent diplomatic overtures to the signatories of the 2015 deal are little more than a symbolic attempt to break out of the political impasse created by Washington.
“Iran should have negotiated with (US President) Trump during his first term,” Falahatpisheh said. “Unfortunately, Iranian officials are known for their costly and untimely decisions.”
This critique of past decisions may be shared by many in Tehran’s commentariat, but the way forward is certainly not.
“Even if talks with the Americans are paused or entangled in new complexities, we should not stop our negotiations with the Europeans,” political analyst Ali Bigdeli told the moderate outlet Fararu.
“The truth is that the Europeans are holding a hostage called the ‘trigger mechanism,’ which they can use to pressure us. If they don’t agree to postpone its activation by a year, they can use it as leverage against us,” he added.
Fearing the trigger
The trigger clause in the 2015 nuclear deal allows any signatory to reimpose lifted UN sanctions on Iran. The United States effectively forfeited that prerogative when the first Trump administration withdrew from the agreement in 2018.
It remains unclear whether the so-called snapback of sanctions was discussed in the Istanbul roundtable on Friday.
European officials described the event as a broad discussion about Tehran’s relationship with the West. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi asserted that it had “nothing to do with negotiations with Washington.”
It did, as far as the media inside Iran are concerned. Whatever their view on the significance of the Istanbul meeting, most editorials linked it to the talks with the US.
“The position of the United States, which has initiated bilateral negotiations with Tehran, has somewhat sidelined Europe’s role,”Khabar Online wrote in an editorial on Friday.
“The nuclear negotiations are not merely a diplomatic engagement between Iran and Europe, but will more broadly affect the balance of power in the region,” it concluded.
The purpose of US President Donald Trump's trip to the Middle East was to sow discord among Islamic countries, said Iran's Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf on Friday.
"His behavior and rhetoric indicated that he aimed to sow discord among Islamic countries, and in a way, by creating threats and insecurity, he sought to sell their weapons and ammunition and pursue instability in the Islamic countries of Southwest Asia," Ghalibaf said after returning from Indonesia where he attended a meeting of the Parliamentary Union of the OIC Member States.
