President Trump said on Friday that he had sent a letter to Iran’s supreme leader offering to reopen negotiations over the country’s fast-advancing nuclear program, but warned that the country would have to choose between curbing its fast-expanding program or losing it in a military attack.
Speaking on Friday in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump suggested that Iran’s nuclear capabilities — which now include enough near-bomb-grade fuel to produce about six weapons — were reaching a critical point. “We’re down to final strokes with Iran,” he told reporters. “We can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
Earlier on Friday on Fox Business, Mr. Trump said: “There are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal. I would prefer to make a deal, because I’m not looking to hurt Iran. They’re great people.”
He said the letter was sent Wednesday and addressed to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. The White House did not provide the text or describe its contents with any specificity. It was unclear if it was sent through the Swiss — the traditional intermediary for communications between Washington and Tehran — or through Russia or another nation.
Mr. Trump’s offer echoes a similar message to Iran during his first term, after he announced in 2018 that he was pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal that had been negotiated three years earlier by the Obama administration. But he never got talks started, and an effort by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. collapsed.
Now, the strategic environment has changed radically. The Justice Department has accused Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of seeking to assassinate Mr. Trump last year; it issued indictments before Mr. Biden left office. Iran’s nuclear facilities are now exposed to attack, after Israel destroyed almost all of the air defenses protecting them in October. And Iran’s regional proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, are in no condition to threaten Israel with retaliation should the Iranian facilities come under attack.
Some senior Israeli officials have argued that there will never be a better moment to take out the major nuclear facilities, though American military officials believe that the Israelis would almost certainly require American equipment and support to do a thorough job. Mr. Trump’s letter appears to be the opening bid to see if Iran’s new vulnerability will make it open to negotiations.
In Iran, officials are engaged in a vigorous debate about whether to negotiate with Mr. Trump. Moderates and reformists, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, took office last year after campaigning on a platform of opening negotiations with Washington to get sanctions lifted, and thus improve a battered economy.
But in the fractured Iranian political system, Ayatollah Khamenei has the last word. Last month, he rejected new negotiations with the United States after Mr. Trump signed an executive order to enforce a “maximum pressure” policy on Iran, stepping up sanctions. The ayatollah has repeatedly said Iran cannot trust that the United States would honor any bargain, especially after Mr. Trump pulled out of the last agreement to restrain Iran’s program.
Curiously, Mr. Pezeshkian has publicly distanced himself from Ayatollah Khamenei’s position. On Sunday, he told Parliament that he favored negotiations but had to abide by Ayatollah Khamenei’s decision. It was an unusually frank acknowledgment of the limits of the president’s power in Iran’s political system and an attempt to put the fallout of such a decision — more sanctions, worsening economy, military strikes on nuclear sites — on the ayatollah.
“My position has been and will remain that I believe in negotiations, but now we have to follow the parameters set by the supreme leader,” Mr. Pezeshkian said.
While the current crisis was prompted by Iran’s relentless drive to enrich uranium at 60 percent purity — just below what is needed for a nuclear weapon — it has its roots in Mr. Trump’s first term. The 2015 nuclear accord negotiated by President Barack Obama was largely working, despite Mr. Trump’s long-running critique that it was a “disaster.” Iran had shipped more than 97 percent of its fuel stockpile out of the country, and international inspectors said they the Iranians were abiding by the sharp restrictions on new production.
But when Mr. Trump withdrew from the accord and reimposed heavy economic sanctions, he predicted that Tehran would come begging for a new deal more favorable to the United States. It did not.
Though Mr. Trump made approaches to the Iranian leadership, he left office in 2021 without any negotiations having taken place. An effort by the Biden administration to revive an agreement collapsed. Now Mr. Trump is trying again, while declaring that he will not let the issue linger.
In the Fox interview with the host Maria Bartiromo, Mr. Trump described his letter as saying, “I hope you’re going to negotiate because it’s going to be a lot better for Iran.”
“If we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing for them,” he said, adding: “The other alternative is we have to do something, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
Experts agree that Iran is now perilously close. The New York Times reported in February that American intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran is exploring a faster, if cruder, approach to developing an atomic weapon if its leadership decides to race for a bomb.
“Up to now, this ‘threshold capability’ to build a weapon has been Iran’s strategic sweet spot,” said Robert Litwak, an expert on the program at the Wilson Center in Washington. “It has a latent capability without crossing the red line of building a working weapon. But it is not clear that is going to continue to work for them.”
In a speech at the Economic Club of New York on Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described an economic pressure campaign on Iran that he said would target “all stages of Iran’s oil supply chain.” He promised to close off Iran’s access to the international financial system and shut down Iran’s oil sector and drone manufacturing capabilities.
“‘Making Iran Broke Again’ will mark the beginning of our updated sanctions policy,” Mr. Bessent said. “If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither.”
Iran’s response to Mr. Trump’s letter may depend on more than its contents.
“How Iran responds largely depends on the tone of Trump’s letter,” said Sasan Karimi, a political analyst in Iran who until a few days ago served as the deputy for Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s former vice president for strategy and foreign minister. “If it’s threatening, it will get a negative reaction, but if it’s significantly respectful and constructive, it can affect Iran’s calculations.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges. More about David E. Sanger
Farnaz Fassihi is the United Nations bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the organization, and also covers Iran and the shadow war between Iran and Israel. She is based in New York. More about Farnaz Fassihi