United States President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that Washington was ready to make a “real deal” with Iran on its nuclear programme. His comment comes a day after he threatened the country with “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before”.
“Iran is not the same country anymore, that I can say,” Trump said during the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Missouri’s Kansas city. “And we’ll see what happens, but we’re ready to make a real deal, not the deal that was done by the previous administration which was a disaster,” he said, according to Politico.
Trump in May announced that he was pulling the US out of a Barack Obama-era nuclear agreement with Iran, calling it “decaying and rotten”. The US then said it will re-impose sanctions against Iran, and has asked some other countries to take similar action.
The nuclear deal, signed in 2015 by the five permanent members of the United Nations, Germany, the European Union and Iran, had lifted decades-old sanctions on Tehran on the promise that it would tone down its nuclear programme considerably.
On Monday, Trump warned Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to “never, ever threaten the United States” again after Rouhani warned the US president against inciting Tehran with hostile policies. Rouhani had said on Sunday: “Peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif too fired back at Trump’s threats, warning him to “be cautious”.
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