Trump threatens ‘there will be bombing’ if Iran fails to make deal on nukes
US president also says he could apply secondary tariffs on Islamic Republic, in first remarks after Tehran rejects his offer for direct talks on nuclear program
WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump threatened Iran on Sunday with bombing and secondary tariffs if Tehran did not come to an agreement with Washington over its nuclear program.
In Trump’s first remarks since Iran rejected direct negotiations with Washington last week, he told NBC News that US and Iranian officials were talking, but did not elaborate.
“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” Trump said in a telephone interview. “It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”
“There’s a chance that if they don’t make a deal, that I will do secondary tariffs on them like I did four years ago,” he added.
Trump’s language represented a sharpening of his comment a few days earlier that if Tehran refused to negotiate a new nuclear agreement, “bad, bad things are going to happen to Iran.”
It was not clear whether Trump was threatening bombing by US planes alone or perhaps in an operation coordinated with Israel.
Iran sent a response through Oman to a letter from Trump urging Tehran to reach a new nuclear deal, saying its policy was not to engage in direct negotiations with the United States while under its maximum pressure campaign and military threats, Tehran’s foreign minister was quoted as saying on Thursday.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian reiterated the policy on Sunday.
“Direct negotiations [with the US] have been rejected, but Iran has always been involved in indirect negotiations, and now too, the Supreme Leader has emphasized that indirect negotiations can still continue,” he said, referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told Politico late last month that “in order to stop a nuclear Iranian program before it is weaponized, a reliable military option should be on the table.”
Analysts have said Iran may be just weeks away from producing a deliverable nuclear weapon — though Tehran denies it is building such arms. Either way, such an attack carries a risk of spreading to a wider conflict.
In the NBC interview, Trump also threatened so-called secondary tariffs, which affect buyers of a country’s goods, on both Russia and Iran. He signed an executive order last week authorizing such tariffs on buyers of Venezuelan oil.
Trump did not elaborate on those potential tariffs.
During his first presidential term, Trump withdrew the US from a 2015 deal between Iran and world powers that placed strict limits on Tehran’s disputed nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.
Trump also reimposed sweeping US sanctions. Since then, the Islamic Republic has far surpassed the agreed limits in its escalating program of uranium enrichment.
Tehran has so far rebuffed Trump’s warning to make a deal or face military consequences.
Iran, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction, denies seeking a nuclear weapon, but it has ramped up its enrichment of uranium up to 60 percent purity, the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so, and has obstructed international inspectors from checking its nuclear facilities.
Tehran says its nuclear program is wholly for civilian energy purposes.
Iran has twice in the past year fired large barrages of missiles and drones at Israel in support of its terror proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen.
In response, Israel struck Iranian facilities, including missile factories and air defenses. That reduced Tehran’s conventional military capabilities, according to analysts and US officials, an assessment disputed by Tehran.
