Trump tells Iran of ‘obliteration’
Talks dead, Tehran asserts as threats, insults resume
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump warned Tuesday that any attack Iran might carry out “on anything American” would result in the “obliteration” of parts of Iran, responding to comments by President Hassan Rouhani that the White House was “mentally handicapped.”
The exchange of threats and insults was at least a temporary setback to Trump’s earlier efforts to de-escalate the confrontation and move toward negotiations.
After his decision last week to call off a military strike in retaliation for the downing of an unmanned reconnaissance drone, Trump had held out the possibility of negotiations with “no preconditions” and said he was not looking for war, even as he insisted that Iran would never be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon.
The president’s com
ments Tuesday stood in contrast to the message delivered by other administration officials, who reiterated that the United States wanted to negotiate. “The United States is not looking to go to war with Iran,” said Mark Esper, the acting defense secretary, on Tuesday. “Rather, we want to get to a diplomatic path.”
But Rouhani said the new sanctions Trump ordered this week against Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior officials had made it impossible to enter into any talks.
Trump wants to renegotiate the 2015 nuclear accord agreed to by Iran, President Barack Obama’s administration and many of the world’s other big powers that constrained Iran’s nuclear program. Trump pulled out of the deal last year, saying it left Iran too much opportunity to get a nuclear weapon and did not do enough to deter the country’s aggression in the Middle East.
“Today, the Americans have become desperate and confused,” Rouhani said Tuesday in a televised address. “This has made them take unusual measures and talk nonsense.”
The sanctions are intended to prevent Khamenei and other officials from entering the United States or using the international banking system. But the move is largely symbolic.
Rouhani ridiculed the effort, noting that the supreme leader never visits the United States nor does business with it.
“You sanction the foreign minister simultaneously with a request for talks,” Rouhani said. He called the sanctions against Khamenei “outrageous and idiotic.”
“The White House is afflicted by mental handicap and does not know what to do,” he added.
Trump called that a “very ignorant and insulting statement,” tweeting that an Iranian attack on any U.S. interest will be met with “great and overwhelming force … overwhelming will mean obliteration.”
Trump’s threat reflected the administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy.
U.S. officials also said they plan sanctions against Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, something that drew Rouhani’s anger during his televised address Tuesday.
While U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he hadn’t heard Rouhani’s reaction to the new sanctions, he said that if true, “that’s a bit immature and childlike.”
“But know that the United States will remain steadfast in undertaking the actions that the president laid out in this strategy to create stability throughout the Middle East, which includes the campaign we have, the economic campaign, the pressure campaign that we have on the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Pompeo added.
National security adviser John Bolton said Tuesday that Iran had an “open door” to negotiations on a revised nuclear deal as he met Israeli and Russian officials for talks on the Iranian presence in Syria. But he said that any talks would have to “completely and verifiably eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program, its pursuit of ballistic missiles delivery systems, its support for international terrorism, and its other malign behavior worldwide.”
The sanctions imposed this week come after Iran’s downing on June 20 of a U.S. surveillance drone, worth over $100 million, above the Strait of Hormuz, sharply escalating tensions in the region.
The United States has also blamed Iran for a recent string of attacks on petrochemical tankers in the Persian Gulf region. Iran has denied involvement.
NEARING THE LIMIT
The crisis gripping the Middle East stems from Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal last year. Recently, Iran quadrupled its production of low-enriched uranium to be on pace to break one of the deal’s terms by Thursday, while also threatening to raise enrichment closer to weapons-grade levels on July 7 if European countries still abiding by the accord don’t offer a new deal.
Within days, Iran said last week, it will have breached a key limit in the 2015 deal that restricts the country’s stockpiles of low-enriched uranium to about 660 pounds.
“Iran leadership doesn’t understand the words ‘nice’ or ‘compassion,’ they never have,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “Sadly, the thing they do understand is Strength and Power, and the USA is by far the most powerful Military Force in the world.”
Trump has sought to leave open a variety of options for pressuring Iran. A senior administration official said that after weekend meetings at Camp David, the White House had directed the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon — including U.S. Cyber Command — to “start pushing proportional options” to Trump’s senior aides for consideration.
But he also faces a delicate balancing act with allies, especially those in the region. While Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have publicly supported the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, senior officials from both countries privately told Pompeo during his recent visit that they do not want a war with Iran.
In such a shooting war, the senior administration official
said, those two countries would most likely bear the brunt of the repercussions. They fear that if Trump were to lose his re-election campaign, they would be left with a war the United States would want to exit.
The United States wants Iran to commit to a long list of new restrictions, including limits on any potential development of a nuclear weapon that go far beyond what got negotiated
in years of talks between the Obama administration and Rouhani’s government.
But Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, has repeatedly said that to negotiate a new accord the United States would first have to re-enter the old one. Trump has rejected that, saying a new agreement must be built from scratch.
European leaders, meanwhile, have appeared cool to the U.S. approach to Iran. Europe wants more emphasis on minimizing the chances of war. Since the downing of the U.S. drone last week, the administration has publicly emphasized its goal of “internationalizing” the Iran crisis.
Speaking to reporters traveling with him to a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, Esper said he wants to help form a broader coalition to deter Iran and compel its leaders to return
to the negotiating table for nuclear talks.
“This is not Iran versus the United States. This is Iran certainly versus the region, and arguably the broader global environment,” said Esper, who took over Monday as acting secretary, replacing Patrick Shanahan, who resigned last week.
Esper said his goal is, first, for allies to express anger at Iran’s activities. Second, he said he wants allies to support “any range of activities” to help deter conflict with Iran.
“This is the reason why we need to internationalize this issue and have our allies and partners work with us to get Iran to come back to the negotiating table and talk about the way ahead,” he said.
Esper said discussions about creating a maritime coalition to secure freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf are still in the early stages. It’s too early, he said, to start “counting ships” and which allies have agreed to participate.
Germany, France and Britain, as well as Russia and China, remain part of the nuclear deal that Trump abandoned last year.
On Tuesday, Rouhani spoke by phone with French President Emmanuel Macron and told him: “If the Americans again want to violate the waters and airspace of Iran, Iran’s armed forces are assigned to confront them and will take a strong approach,” according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.
But he added that Iran does not have any interest in escalating tensions in the region and never seeks war with any country, including the United States, the news agency reported, quoting him as saying: “We have always been committed to improving the stability and security of the region, and we will take efforts in this direction.”
Information for this article was contributed by David E. Sanger, David D. Kirkpatrick and Isabel Kershner of The New York Times; by Lolita C. Baldor, Nasser Karimi, Jon Gambrell and Aron Heller of The Associated Press; by Erin Cunningham, Ruth Eglash, Carol Morello and Missy Ryan of The Washington Post; and by Joshua Gallu and Ladane Nasseri of Bloomberg News.