US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “should be very worried”, as Washington and Tehran appeared poised to begin nuclear talks this week.
He has repeatedly threatened Iran after its brutal suppression of protests against the government. Thousands of demonstrators have been killed and Mr Trump has said “help is on its way” and warned that the US military is “locked and loaded”.
“I would say he should be very worried, yeah, he should be,” Mr Trump told NBC on Wednesday. “They're negotiating with us.”
It was a day of drama as to whether talks between Washington and Tehran would take place. Initially set to be held in Turkey, they were moved to Oman after an Iranian request.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that for any talks to be fruitful they would have to include limiting the range of Iran's ballistic missiles. They would also have to address its “sponsorship of terrorist organisations across the region”, its nuclear programme and its treatment of its own people.
Tehran has repeatedly rejected such demands and it briefly appeared on Wednesday that the talks would be scrapped. However, a White House official told The National that planning for talks resumed after lobbying by several Arab and Muslim leaders. Several countries are concerned about potential chaos spreading if the Iranian government is toppled, as well as the risk of a cornered regime firing missiles towards US bases they host.
Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a post on X that the talks would go on in Oman on Friday. US special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Mr Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner are expected to take part. US officials told Reuters that talks would be in Muscat.
Oman has been the main interlocutor between Washington and Tehran for more than a decade.
The US military has sent warships and missile-defence systems into the region ahead of potential strikes against Iran. In June, the US military struck three Iranian nuclear sites.
“We went in, we wiped out their nuclear. If I didn't take out their nuclear, we wouldn't have peace in the Middle East, because the Arab countries could have never done that,” Mr Trump told NBC.
“They were very, very afraid of Iran – they're not afraid of Iran any more.”
Sources in the region told The National that representatives from the UAE, Egypt, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are expected to attend the talks.
Iran's semi-official Isna news agency reported the negotiations would adopt a format similar to the rounds last year that were mediated by Oman and held in its capital, Muscat, and at the Omani embassy in Rome.
Turkey, Oman and several other nations had offered to hold the talks, Iranian officials said.
Despite signs of diplomatic progress, many in Washington think military action remains the most likely outcome.
“The big question is how Iran responds [to any strikes], because the Iranians are openly saying their nightmare situation is that they become helpless and sitting ducks,” said Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
Tehran is “saying that they're willing to take a big gamble and hit back as hard as they can in the hope that Trump will back off and not do that again.”
Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran Programme at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, said large swathes of the Iranian diaspora would see it as “a political own goal” if Trump de-escalates now, essentially leaving an empowered regime in place in Tehran.
“I for one think that no deal at the moment is really worth the paper it's written on,” he said.
Mr Taleblu referenced the notorious moment in Barack Obama's presidency when in 2012 he said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “red line”. He ultimately did not follow through with military action and cut a deal with Russia for Bashar Al Assad's stockpiles to be removed. Critics say Mr Obama's failure to attack Mr Assad emboldened the Assad regime and other actors.
If Mr Trump backs down and withdraws forces from the region now, the “Islamic republic, which was weak but lethal, will grow to become stable and then potentially even strong and increasingly more lethal”, Mr Ben Taleblu said.
