Two days after delivering an all-caps warning that Iran would suffer historic “consequences” for threatening the United States, President Trump on Tuesday tamped down his hawkish rhetoric and signaled he’s ready to make a “real deal” on Tehran’s nuclear program.
“Iran is not the same country anymore, that I can say,” Trump said at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City, Mo.
“But we’re ready to make a real deal, not the deal that was done by the previous administration, which was a disaster.”
Trump withdrew in May from a 2015 nuclear pact President Barack Obama and a number of other countries inked with Iran — a deal Trump has called “the worst” ever negotiated.
The softer tone follows a weekend war of words between DC and Tehran.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also announced the United States would engage in a “diplomatic and economic pressure campaign” against Iran.
Trump on Sunday responded to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s comments that hostile behavior from the US would result in the “mother of all wars” by vowing in a tweet that “YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED.”
Earlier Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, Iran’s armed forces chief of staff, echoed Rouhani’s comments that America “should not play with the lion’s tail” because “they will receive a strong, unimaginable and regrettable response of great magnitude in the region and the world.”
With Post wires