The United States and Iran went into high-stakes talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme on Saturday with President Donald Trump threatening military action if they fail to produce a deal. The two sides were engaged in “indirect” talks — via an intermediary — in the Omani capital Muscat, Iran’s foreign ministry said. The Americans had called for the meetings to be face-to-face. Disagreement over the format indicated the task facing the long-term adversaries, who are seeking a new nuclear deal after Trump pulled out of an earlier agreement during his first term in 2018. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is leading the Iranian delegation while Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff heads the US team. “Our intention is to reach a fair and honourable agreement from an equal position,” Araghchi said earlier in a video posted by Iranian state television. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei told the broadcaster that the negotiations were “just a beginning” and that Tehran did not “expect this round of talks to be very long”. The two parties are in “separate halls” and “are conveying their views and positions to each other through the Omani foreign minister”, he posted separately on X. Iran, weakened by Israel’s pummelling of its allies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, is seeking relief from wide-ranging sanctions hobbling its economy. Tehran has agreed to the meetings despite baulking at Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of ramping up sanctions and repeated military threats. Meanwhile the US, hand-in-glove with Iran’s arch-enemy Israel, wants to stop Tehran from ever getting close to developing a nuclear bomb. There were no visible signs of the high-level meeting at a luxury hotel in Muscat, where there were no flags or unusual security measures and little traffic on the streets. Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal earlier that “our position today” starts with demanding that Iran completely dismantle its nuclear programme — a view held by hardliners around Trump that few expect Iran to accept. “That doesn’t mean, by the way, that at the margin we’re not going to find other ways to find compromise between the two countries,” Witkoff told the newspaper. “Where our red line will be, there can’t be weaponisation of your nuclear capability,” he added.