Iran confirms ‘indirect’ talks with Trump admin set to take place in Oman

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed on Tuesday that his government had decided to start high-level talks with the United States.

“Iran and the United States will meet in Oman on Saturday for indirect high-level talks,” he wrote on X, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump announcedthe talks set to take place in Muscat, which he called direct.

“It is as much an opportunity as it is a test. The ball is in America’s court,” Tehran’s top diplomat said in his social media post.

Speaking in the Oval Office of the White House after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, Trump announced: “We’re having direct talks with Iran, and they’ve started.

“There’s a major meeting going on between us and Iran. That will take place on Saturday, and it will be top level,” the president told reporters, adding: “We have a very big meeting, and we’ll see what can happen. And I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable.

“Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” he stressed. “If it can be done diplomatically in a full way, the way it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing. … Hopefully, those talks will be successful.

“And I think everybody agrees that putting a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious, and the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with,” Trump said, referring to a possible military response.

Iranian state media reported on Tuesday that the talks would be led by Araqchi and U.S. Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff, with Badr bin Hamad bin Hamood al-Busaidi, the foreign minister of Oman, as a mediator.

Iran’s Nournews, an outlet with close ties to the regime, called Trump’s statement regarding direct talks as part of a “psychological operation aimed at influencing domestic and international public opinion.”

In an interview with NBC News on March 30, Trump warned that if no deal is reached to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, “there will be bombing—and it will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”

The U.S. president recently sent a letter to Iran urging it to agree to a new nuclear agreement, reportedly allotting it two months to comply and warning that the consequences for failing to do so would be dire.

During his first term in 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal with Tehran and stepped up sanctions on the regime. The agreement offered sanctions relief in exchange for a promise to dial back its nuclear activity for 10 years.

The Islamic Republic has since significantly increased its stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium, enough to build six nuclear bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency watchdog.

Israel has said that a military option is required to deter Tehran from taking the final steps toward acquiring nuclear weapons. Netanyahu declared during his White House visit on Monday that he and Trump were “united in the goal that Iran does not ever get nuclear weapons.

“If it can be done diplomatically in a full way, the way that it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing. But whatever happens, we have to make sure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons,” he said.

JNS