Trump says US will ‘finish the job’ against Iran, ‘peacefully or otherwise’

‘I don’t think we need any help with Iran,’ US president insists as he heads to China; Islamic Republic remains defiant, claims US must accept its ‘rightful and definitive demands’

If Iran does not accept US terms for a deal to end the war and address its nuclear program, the United States will “finish the job,” US President Donald Trump declared on Tuesday.

“They’ll either do the right thing, or we’ll finish the job,” he said before taking off for a high-stakes trip to China, which maintains ties with Iran and remains a major consumer of its oil exports.

Trump rejected the idea that rising prices in the US pushed him to seek an end to the war.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situations,” he said. “I don’t think about anybody.”

“I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

“The most important thing by far is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump continued. “Every American understands it. If the stock market goes up or down a little bit, the American people understand it.”

Ahead of his meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, Trump said he did not think he would need to enlist China to resolve the conflict with Iran, which has continued to bottle up maritime traffic that normally provides one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.

“I don’t think we need any help with Iran. We’ll win it one way or the other, peacefully or otherwise,” Trump said. “No matter how you cut it, we win.”

Trump claimed that Iran agreed that they will never have nuclear weapons “and then that’s not what they sent to me. We don’t play games.”

“We have a lot of things to discuss. I wouldn’t say Iran is one of them, to be honest with you, because we have Iran very much under control.” Trump insisted. “We are either gonna make a deal or they will be decimated.”

After reports that Pakistan allowed Iran to stash fighter jets on its territory during the war, Trump said that the Pakistanis “have been great” mediators.

Iran remains defiant

Iran’s chief negotiator meanwhile said Tuesday that Washington must accept Tehran’s latest peace plan or face failure, after Trump warned Monday the truce was on the brink of collapse.

The war, which erupted more than two months ago with US-Israeli strikes on Iran, has spread throughout the Middle East and roiled the global economy despite the ceasefire, impacting hundreds of millions worldwide.

Both sides have refused to make concessions and repeatedly threatened to resume fighting, but neither appears willing to return to all-out war.

“There is no alternative but to accept the rights of the Iranian people as laid out in the 14-point proposal. Any other approach will be completely inconclusive; nothing but one failure after another,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said in a post on X.

Iran sent its latest proposal in response to an earlier US plan, details of which remain limited. Media reports have said the American plan involved a one-page memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the fighting and establishing a framework for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran’s foreign ministry said its response called for ending the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, halting the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and securing the release of Iranian assets frozen abroad under longstanding sanctions.

But Trump slammed Tehran’s reply as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE,” saying the United States would enjoy a “complete victory” over Iran and that the truce that has halted fighting for over a month was on its last legs.

In a show of defiance, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it carried out drills in Tehran aimed at “enhancing combat capability to confront any movement of the American-Zionist enemy,” state media reported Tuesday.

Iranian defense ministry spokesman Reza Talaei-Nik said that if the US “does not submit to the rightful and definitive demands of the Iranian nation in the diplomatic arena, it should expect a repeat of its defeats on the military battlefield.”

‘Living day to day’

The war of words has unnerved people in Iran who do not know what the coming months will bring.

“We are just trying to dig our nails into anything that could help us survive. The future is so uncertain and we are just living day to day,” Maryam, a 43-year-old painter from the capital Tehran, told Paris-based journalists.

“We are trying to find a way to continue. Keeping hope is very difficult right now.”

Trump’s angry reaction to Iran’s counteroffer sparked a spike in oil prices and dashed hopes that a deal could be quickly negotiated to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping.

Iran is restricting maritime traffic in the waterway and has been setting up a payment mechanism to charge tolls for crossing ships, sparking a global energy crisis that the head of Saudi oil giant Aramco has described as the largest energy supply shock “the world has ever experienced.”

US officials have stressed it would be “unacceptable” for Tehran to maintain control of the strait, which usually carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas.

“Iran should not use this strait as a weapon to pressure or to blackmail the Gulf countries,” Qatari foreign minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said on Tuesday.

According to a report Tuesday in the New York Times that cited US intelligence assessments, Iran still has access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it has along the key waterway, allowing it to threaten vessels traversing the Strait of Hormuz.

The report quoted those knowledge of the assessments as saying the Iranians can use mobile launchers inside the sites to move missiles elsewhere and that some of the sites have launchpads from which missiles can be fired, with only three of the 33 sites near Hormuz completely inaccessible.