US President Donald Trump wants to talk to Iran's leaders about a new nuclear deal without any preconditions such as relief from the maximum pressure campaign the United States has imposed on the country, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said in an interview on Wednesday
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th August, 2019) US President Donald Trump wants to talk to Iran's leaders about a new nuclear deal without any preconditions such as relief from the maximum pressure campaign the United States has imposed on the country, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said in an interview on Wednesday."[Trump] has been clear that he wants to have conversations with the leaders of Iran without preconditions," Gidley told Fox news. "But the fact is Iran is under a maximum pressure campaign by this president because of its decade's worth of malign behavior. It's the largest state sponsor of terror on the globe."
Gidley said that US sanctions on Iran are not going to be lifted at this time.
On Monday, Trump said during his closing press conference at the G7 Summit in France that he would meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani under the right circumstances to resolve the tensions between the two countries. The US president said he does not rule out holding such a meeting within a short amount of time.
French President Emmanuel Macron said during a joint press conference with Trump earlier that he would like to see a meeting take place between Trump and Rouhani within weeks.
Trump said it would be realistic to expect a meeting with Rouhani take place in the coming weeks.
US-Iran relations have been in a downward spiral since the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal last spring. The United States has since proclaimed it intends to bring down Iran's sale of oil to zero and reintroduced sanctions against almost all major sectors of country's economy.
The situation worsened over recent months following a series of attacks on commercial tankers in the Gulf of Oman and Strait of Hormuz, for which Washington and its allies have blamed Iran. Tehran has rejected all accusations.
