President Trump on Wednesday vowed to negotiate a “verified nuclear peace agreement” with Iran, saying he wants to avoid a military clash by reaching a deal that prevents Tehran from acquiring an atomic weapon.
Mr. Trump, who withdrew from the 2015 nuclear accord that Iran negotiated with the Obama administration, effectively called for a do-over on Wednesday. In an early morning post on his social media site, the president said the United States and Iran “should start working on it immediately, and have a big Middle East Celebration when it is signed and completed.”
“I want Iran to be a great and successful Country, but one that cannot have a Nuclear Weapon,” Mr. Trump wrote.
The diplomatic entreaty by the president came just hours after he announced a very different strategy toward Iran: a return to the “maximum pressure” campaign that he employed during his first term to threaten the country’s religious leadership with vast economic sanctions and other measures designed to isolate the regime.
“Iran’s behavior threatens the national interest of the United States; it is therefore in the national interest to impose maximum pressure on the Iranian regime to end its nuclear threat, curtail its ballistic missile program and stop its support for terrorist groups,” Mr. Trump wrote in the order he announced on Tuesday.
That order triggered a harsh response from the Iranian government, which claimed in a statement that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon and that there was no need for economic punishments by the United States.
“Maximum pressure is a failed experiment, and trying it again will lead to another failure,” said Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, according to Shargh, an Iranian news outlet. “If the main issue is that Iran does not pursue nuclear weapons, this is achievable and there is no problem.”
American intelligence officials have said they believe Iran has not yet made the decision to build a nuclear bomb. But they have said Tehran has continued to enrich fuel for a potential weapon and have explored how they could build a crude weapon in a matter of days or weeks if they decided that it was necessary.
Mr. Trump said repeatedly on Tuesday that Iran should never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, but he dodged questions about whether the United States would participate with Israel in hypothetical attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, where the enrichment and other work has been taking place for years.
Instead, the president indicated that the new executive order would serve as a threat to Iran that if the country continued to pursue a nuclear weapon or engage in terrorism, the United States would impose sanctions with devastating economic effects.
But he also said he was “torn” about the necessity of the order, suggesting that he would prefer to find some kind of diplomatic path to a resolution with Iran.
“Everybody wants me to sign it,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he signed the “maximum pressure” order in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “I’ll do that. It’s very tough on Iran. It’s what we had before. I’m going to sign it, but hopefully we’re not going to have to use it very much. We will see whether or not we can arrange or work out a deal with Iran and everybody can live together.”
“Maybe that’s possible,” he added, “and maybe it’s not possible. So I’m signing this, and I’m unhappy to do it.”
In his Wednesday social media post, Mr. Trump said that he hoped to reach an accommodation with Iran’s leaders that would allow the United States to avoid the need for either economic or military attacks on Iran.
“Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran into smithereens, ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED,” he wrote. “I would much prefer a Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement, which will let Iran peacefully grow and prosper.”
The president’s desire to engage in negotiations is a turnabout from his first term, when he often derided former President Barack Obama for agreeing to a nuclear deal with Iran. Under that deal, Iran turned over 97 percent of its nuclear material and limited its research and development work, but did not dismantle all its facilities.
Mr. Trump called the Obama-negotiated deal “defective at its core” and said it was “horrible” and the “worst” deal ever made.
Now, the president appears willing to try again. Iran has also shown openness to a negotiation, but a capacity to build a weapon may be its last real deterrent, after the setbacks of its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah at the hands of Israeli forces, and the overthrow of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.
Hamas’s military force has been dramatically diminished after 15 months of Israeli bombardment in Gaza following the Oct. 7 attacks that killed about 1,200 people. Israel also leveled a series of attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many of its leaders and degrading its ability to attack.
Those developments — along with Israel’s effective defense against Iranian missile strikes last year — may have given Mr. Trump more leverage in a negotiation.