US President Donald Trump on Monday asserted that a “new, and more reasonable, regime” was in place in Iran, indicating a regime change of sorts, and said Washington has made “great progress” in “serious talks” with it. “Regime change” is a goal he has said he set for himself, but there has been no indication of that from Tehran, which has continued to issue bellicose statements.
Trump followed up his Monday statement on Truth Social with a claim to reporters on Sunday: “We’ve had regime change.” He said that after the destruction of the first and second layers of the Tehran regime, they were now on to the “third regime”, and that Washington was speaking to “a whole different group of people”.
The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Egypt, and Pakistan, who met over the weekend, gave an indication of possible diplomatic movement in a readout released by Islamabad. While Tehran denied there were “direct negotiations”, a foreign ministry spokesperson did indicate that messages through intermediaries “were discussed”.
Trump said on Sunday that, as a gesture to demonstrate they are genuine interlocutors, the Iranians whom he did not identify allowed 20 oil ships to sail through the Strait of Hormuz with Pakistani flags. He did not say if any of the ships were connected to the US.
However, in his Monday Truth Social post, Trump also issued a threat that “if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business’, we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!)”.
He said, “We have purposefully not yet ‘touched’” those facilities. Tasnim News Agency reported a couple of hours before Trump’s post that Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei denied that Tehran had direct negotiations with the US, but said, “What has been discussed were messages received through intermediaries indicating a US desire for talks”.
“The only contact was requests for talks from the US transmitted through third countries,” he said at his weekly briefing, Tasnim reported. Trump’s post about progress in talks came after the US reinforced its military presence in the region with over 50,000 troops, including 2,000 soldiers from the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division, who could be deployed rapidly.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar said after meetings with his counterparts Badr Abdelatty of Egypt, Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, and Hakan Fidan of Turkiye that they “discussed possible ways to bring an early and permanent end to the war in the region”.
He added that he briefed them on “the prospects of potential US-Iran talks in Islamabad”, but did not indicate that they were imminent or that Tehran had agreed to them. Meanwhile, there was no let-up in the fighting. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced “a new wave of retaliatory strikes” against facilities in the region used by US and Israeli personnel, according to Tasnim.