Trump: US Has No Immediate Plans to Strike Iran

President Donald Trump told the Financial Times on Tuesday that the United States has no immediate plan to renew strikes on Iran. He added that American forces are "locked and loaded" if action becomes necessary. Trump also confirmed that indirect negotiations with Tehran are continuing, including talks over Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium.

Israel has a direct stake in Washington's next move. On Tuesday, The New York Times, citing American officials, reported that US Central Command had prepared plans for a possible strike on Iran as early as Wednesday evening. The same report stated that Israel had passed Washington intelligence suggesting Iran intends to use chemical weapons against its neighbors.

Trump struck an upbeat tone on the talks. "We seem to be getting everything we want," he said. The military, he added, was ready "if we need to go, but there may be no reason for it." He called Washington's current position "a brilliant situation."

Trump declined to disclose any military plans. He confirmed that the negotiations cover Iran's stockpile of roughly 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium, which he called "nuclear dust." "Even though it's under hundreds of tons of rock, I would say that I'm not happy that it will be there," Trump said. "So it's one of the things that we do talk to them about. But you know, we're having discussions, and we'll see how that all works out."

The president again rejected the idea that the two countries are at war. "We're not really in a war," he said, adding that "we haven't really had a war with them in a long time, six months, maybe more." He continued: "I don't consider that we're in war like Ukraine, wars like World War I, World War II."

A senior Iranian official told Reuters on Tuesday that Iran and the United States remain far from a deal to end the war.

Trump made similar remarks to reporters on Monday, the day before the midterm elections. "We had a war with Iran. We won," he said. "I don't know if you even call it a war because we haven't been doing any fighting for months."

In a Monday interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Trump stated that preventing an Iranian bomb remained the priority. "We cannot let Iran, an evil nation, who has killed many of our people, Soleimani is an example, no longer with us, but killed many of our people, we cannot let them have a nuclear weapon, and we won't," he said. He also insisted that Iranian officials "want to make a deal very badly, there's a very good chance we make a deal."