US President Donald Trump on Wednesday (June 18) declined to answer reporters' questions on whether the U.S. was planning to strike Iran or its nuclear facilities, and said the Iranians had reached out but he feels "it's very late to be talking," Reuters reports.
"There's a big difference between now and a week ago," Trump told reporters outside the White House. "Nobody knows what I'm going to do."
Trump said that Iran had proposed to come for talks at the White House. He did not provide details. He described Iran as totally defenseless, with no air defence whatsoever.
“Iran's got a lot of trouble and they want to negotiate and I said, 'why didn't you negotiate with me before all this death and destruction? Why didn't you negotiate?' I said to the people, 'why didn't you negotiate with me two weeks ago?' You could have done fine. You would have had a country. It's very sad to watch this. I mean, I've never seen anything like it. So you never even thought it was going to be the reverse, I didn't think so. And there's time. You got to you've got to do something. You've got to negotiate,” Trump said.
Reporter: ''Have the Iranians reached out to you?''
Trump: ''Yes.''
Reporter: ''And what did you say?''
Trump: ''I said it's very late. You know, I said it's very late to be talking. We may meet. I mean it's, I don't know. There's a big difference between now and a week ago, right? Big difference. And at the end, last minute, they said, 'no, we're not going to do that.' And they got hit, remember, 60 days. And then came the... 61, is going to become a very famous number. That was one hell of a hit. That first hit, that was one hell of a hit. Not sustainable, to be honest. That's where, it ended, it ended on the first night.''
Reporter:''Is it too late though, do you think it's too late now?''
Trump: ''Nothing's too late. But they've suggested that they come to the White House. That's, you know, courageous but you know it's like not easy for them to do, but they suggest because I can't go now because of what's going on. I had to come back early from the G7, which was terrific, by the way, in Canada. Really terrific, good people.
Well, I don't know how much longer it's going to go on. They are totally defenseless. They have no air defence whatsoever, totally captured. You know, we've totally captured the air.
Unconditional surrender, that means 'I've had it.' Okay. I've had it. I give up, no more, then we go blow up all the you know, all the nuclear stuff that's all over the place there. You know, they had bad intentions. You know, for 40 years, they've been saying 'death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else' that they didn't like. They were bullies. They were schoolyard bullies. And now they're not bullies anymore. But we'll see what happens. Look, nothing's finished until it's finished. A war is very complex. A lot of bad things can happen, a lot of turns are made so I don't know. I wouldn't say that we won anything yet. I would say that we sure as hell made a lot of progress and we'll see how the next week is going to be very big, maybe in less than a week, maybe less."
