US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday that President-elect Donald Trump has an opportunity to negotiate with Iran, saying Tehran’s development of nuclear weapons is not inevitable.
The outgoing top US diplomat acknowledged that the cleric-run state may more seriously consider nuclear weapons after military setbacks in the region.
In the past year, Israel’s military has attacked Iranian air defenses and weakened its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, while rebels ousted its main Arab ally Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria.
“I don’t think nuclear weapons are inevitable,” Blinken said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
As “they’ve lost different lines of defense, certainly, you’ll see more thinking about that,” Blinken said.
But the US Secretary of State said Iran is aware of the consequences of acquiring nuclear weapons and added: “I think there is a possibility for negotiations.”
Iran denies making nuclear weapons, saying its controversial nuclear work is for peaceful purposes.
In his first term, Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, which was negotiated under former President Barack Obama, and then imposed sweeping sanctions.
“President Trump said when he pulled out of the deal last time that he wanted, as he put it, a better, stronger deal. Right,” Blinken said.
He said that no American administration will allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
“Either way, I’m confident that just as that was the policy of our administration, that will be the policy of the next administration,” he said of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
US President Joe Biden’s administration held indirect talks with Iran to restore the nuclear deal as soon as he takes office in 2021.
The talks largely failed over disputes over the scope of US sanctions relief and Biden has backed pressure on Iran over its support of the Palestinian armed group Hamas since its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk reportedly met with a senior Iranian official after the US election to encourage peace.
Blinken also rejected calls for the United States to topple Iran’s government, which has opposed Washington since it overthrew the US-backed ruler in a popular uprising in 1979.
“I think if we look at the last 20 years, our experiments in regime change have not been successful at all,” Blinken said.
Blinken acknowledged domestic opposition to Iran’s existing cleric-run state structure, but said it was “not as clear-cut as that.”
“The opposition reflects at least half the population, but not the entire population,” he said, pointing to differences between cities and rural areas.
“There is a very conservative element in Iran that is significant in numbers and probably grateful to the regime,” he said.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
