(AFP) – US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Iran gave him a “very big present” related to the Strait of Hormuz, boosting his confidence that he was talking to the right people in Tehran to end the war. The cryptic announcement came a day after Trump unexpectedly postponed threatened attacks on Iran’s power plants and said Washington was in negotiations with unspecified figures in Iran.
Tehran has denied being part of any talks to end the war, which is now in its fourth week and has disrupted global oil supplies passing through the strategic Hormuz Strait. “They did something yesterday that was amazing actually. They gave us a present and the present arrived today. And it was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“That meant one thing to me — we’re dealing with the right people.” Speaking at the swearing-in ceremony for new US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Trump said the “gift” was “very significant,” adding that it was “oil and gas-related.” Asked if it was related to his demand that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil traffic, Trump replied: “Yeah, it was related to the flow and to the strait.”
The US president added that the “present” was not related to Iran’s nuclear program, but repeated his claim that the Iranian side “agreed they will never have a nuclear weapon.”
– ‘We negotiate with bombs’ –
Trump has not yet revealed who the United States is negotiating with in Tehran, saying only on Monday as he postponed a threat to attack Iran’s energy sites by five days that it is a “top person.” “We’re actually talking to the right people, and they want to make a deal so badly,” Trump said.
Former Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the joint Israeli-US air campaign, and successor Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public. But Trump said that the killing of Khamenei senior and a host of other top Iranian officials meant “we have really regime change. The leaders are all very different with the ones that we started off with.”
US Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, global envoy Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner were all involved in the Iranian talks, Trump said. But he did not confirm reports that Witkoff and Kushner were headed to Pakistan for talks with Iran, with Vance possibly to follow afterward if the negotiations appeared serious.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif offered on Tuesday to act as a mediator to end the conflict. He said he had spoken with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, promising Islamabad’s help to bring peace to the region. Trump meanwhile joked that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “didn’t want it to be settled” because he wanted to keep striking Iranian targets.
“We see ourselves as part of this negotiation as well. We negotiate with bombs,” Hegseth said when he was called to the podium by Trump.
– Danny KEMP
© 2024 AFP
