TEHRAN – Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has criticized the U.S. President Donald Trump over his recent remarks on Iran’s nuclear program, urging Washington to return to diplomacy instead of repeating past mistakes driven by false intelligence and Israeli influence.
In a post on X, Araghchi recalled his fifth round of talks with Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, on May 23, noting that Iran had made its position clear at the time: “Zero nuclear weapons means we do have a deal; zero enrichment means we do not have a deal.”
He said that if the U.S. president were to review the minutes of those meetings, he would see how close the two sides had come to reaching a historic nuclear agreement.
Drawing a parallel with the 2003 Iraq invasion, Araghchi wrote that Washington should remember there was never any real intelligence proving Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Instead, he said, that war resulted in “unfathomable destruction, thousands of dead American soldiers, and seven trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayers’ money wasted.”
The Iranian foreign minister added that similar false claims are now being made about Iran’s nuclear activities, noting Israel's deceiving of U.S. officials into promoting the notion that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon. “With that plan’s failure,” he said, “Israel is now trying to fabricate another threat from Iran’s defensive capabilities. But the American people have grown tired of fighting Israel’s forever wars.”
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