United States President Donald Trump said on Saturday that Iran had “an interest in reaching an agreement” as negotiations over the country’s nuclear programme and the ongoing conflict continued without resolution.
In a telephone interview with French broadcaster BFMTV, Trump said he was uncertain whether a deal would soon be reached.
“I have no idea. If they don’t, they’re going to have a very bad time. They have an interest in reaching an agreement,” the American president told the BFMTV correspondent in the US.
Trump said that Washington could rapidly destroy Iranian infrastructure, while insisting he had not underestimated Tehran’s resilience in the war.
“I didn’t underestimate anything. We hit them unbelievably hard,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News after he visited China.
He added that the US “left their bridges, we left their electricity capacity. We can knock that all out in two days. Everything.”
Trump described repeated breakdowns in diplomacy with Iran, saying negotiations had become unreliable and unpredictable.
“They were going to give us the dust, everything we wanted, and every time they make a deal, they — the next day it’s like we didn’t have that conversation, and that’s taking place about five times, there’s something wrong with them, actually they’re crazy,” he said.
Trump also framed a possible solution as a choice between escalation and restraint. “It’s either going to be violent or not violent, and I far prefer not violent,” he said.
When asked about the midterm elections in the US in November, Trump said, “I’m not going to let the election determine what’s going to happen with respect to Iran,” reiterating his position that Tehran cannot have a nuclear program.
According to several media reports, Trump is expected to decide in the coming hours whether or not to resume strikes against the Iranian regime, as talks aimed at ending the conflict and addressing Iran’s nuclear programme have so far failed to produce results.
So far 78 ships redirected from transiting Strait of Hormuz, says US military
The US said that it had so far redirected 78 commercial vessels and disabled four others to enforce Trump’s blockade on ships travelling to and from Iranian ports via the Strait of Hormuz.
“As of May 16, 78 commercial ships have been redirected, and 4 have been disabled to ensure compliance,” US Central Command said on X.
Earlier, the head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee Ebrahim Azizi said Iran had prepared a mechanism to manage traffic through the Strait of Hormuz along a designated route that would be unveiled soon.
Azizi added that only commercial vessels and parties cooperating with Iran would benefit from the arrangement. He said fees would be collected for specialised services provided under the mechanism.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that the US would face growing economic consequences from its “war of choice” on Iran.
On X, Araghchi said Americans would be forced to bear the rising costs of a conflict with Tehran. “Put aside gas price hike and stock market bubble. Real pain begins when US debt and mortgage rates start to jump,” he said.
He also pointed to growing economic pressures inside the US, saying auto loan delinquencies had already reached a more than 30-year high. “This was all avoidable,” Araghchi added.
Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations accused the US of attempting to manufacture a “false image” of international support for its actions through a politically motivated draft resolution at the United Nations.
In a statement posted on X, the Iranian mission said it had become “crystal clear” that Washington was seeking to exploit the number of co-sponsors backing the resolution to justify what it described as “ongoing unlawful actions” and pave the way for “further military adventurism in the region.”
The Iranian mission further warned that any future escalation by the US would also place responsibility on countries supporting the resolution. “No political excuse or diplomatic cover can absolve them of responsibility for facilitating, enabling, and legitimising US aggression,” it added.
Moreover, Iran “remains committed to diplomacy and peaceful solutions,” the country’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a message to Pope Leo XIV, Iranian state media reported.
Pezeshkian also expressed Tehran’s appreciation for the Catholic leader’s “moral and logical stance on the recent military aggressions against Iran,” according to the IRNA news agency. Iran targeted the goals of the US and Israel “within the framework of legitimate defence,” the president said, calling on the international community to “act responsibly against America’s illegal actions.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei invoked anti-colonial writer Aimé Césaire to criticise what he described as the West’s moral decline, hypocrisy and inability to address crises stemming from its own wars and policies of domination.
In a post on X, Baghaei quoted from Césaire’s seminal work, Discourse on Colonialism, writing, “A civilisation that was incapable of solving the problems it created was a decadent civilisation; a civilisation that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilisation.”
He also cited another passage from the work, saying: “A civilisation that plays fast and loose with its principles is a dying civilisation.”