US President Donald Trump during a meeting with NATO Secretary General said the ceasefire agreement he signed with Iran exactly three weeks ago is “over.”
Trump, who warned last month of “economic catastrophe” if the war continued, remains under the same political pressures to see the conflict end. Already, the US and Iran had been engaged in tit-for-tat strikes: Iran on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, and the US in retaliatory action on Iranian military sites. The attacks have caused oil prices to jump.
Trump had also already reversed a key provision contained in the agreement that allowed Iran to sell its oil on the global market. In his fiery remarks in Ankara, Trump said he would allow his negotiators to continue pursuing a broader nuclear deal with Iran, but dismissed the exercise as a “waste of time.”
Responding to what he called an “interesting question” on the status of the deal, the president suggested there was little to gain from engaging with “cuckoos.” A team led by Vice President JD Vance had been under a 60-day deadline to secure technical concessions from Tehran to curtain its nuclear ambitions.
Those talks had been slow-going, however, and mainly focused on implementing the Memorandum of Understanding, which Trump signed at the Palace of Versailles on June 17. Mediators of the deal, led by Pakistan and Qatar, will almost certainly now be hurriedly trying to get the agreement back on the rails.
But another player — Israel — will have heard Trump’s comments with different ears. Deeply skeptical of his diplomatic attempts with Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could view the president’s comments as an opening to continue operations both in Lebanon, against Hezbollah, or in Iran itself.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday morning that he believes the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran “is over,” following a series of strikes across the region. “It’s a waste of time dealing with them,” Trump said at the NATO summit.
It was the clearest indication yet that Trump’s deal has all but collapsed. The US president’s latest comments followed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps saying it had launched strikes on US military targets across Bahrain and Kuwait in response to US strikes on Iran.
Trump castigated Iran as “evil, sick people” and said “they’re scum,” as his preliminary deal with Tehran appears to be teetering on collapse. Speaking at the start of a NATO summit in Turkey, Trump called the country “dirty players” for targeting commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, violating a ceasefire.
Trump said he’ll let his negotiators “keep talking if they want,” but added that the US was wasting time talking with Iran, and voiced a desire to “do our business” instead of trying to pursue diplomacy.
“We have to rid their cancer, their cancer,” he said. “And you know what you do? You’ve got to cut out cancer early. And that’s the way I feel.”
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