The Iran war is “very close to over” with authorities in Tehran eager to agree a peace deal, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed in an interview broadcast Wednesday.
“We’ve beaten them militarily, totally,” Trump told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo in a prerecorded interview. “I think it’s close to over, I view it as very close to over ... If I pulled up stakes right now it would take them 20 years to rebuild that country, and we’re not finished.”
“We’ll see what happens, I think they want to make a deal very badly,” he added.
The President’s latest comments come amid growing market optimism that a diplomatic solution to the U.S.-Iran war can be found, despite the failure of peace talks last weekend.
Trump downplayed global market turbulence sparked by the war and said oil prices, which have soared due to supply disruptions, would soon fall.
He again defended U.S. military operations against Iran, saying: “We have to stop them from ever having a nuclear weapon.”
Trump predicted that when the war was over, the “stock market is going to boom, it’s already booming.”
Trump later told the New York Post that fresh U.S.-Iran talks in Islamabad “could be happening over the next two days.”
He had initially told the outlet in a phone interview that additional negotiations could be “a little bit slow” and would likely happen in Europe, but called back about 30 minutes later with updated information, the Post reported.
