Will negotiation help avoid an escalation? The United States and Iran announced the holding of talks this Friday in Oman, while Donald Trump maintains pressure on the mullahs’ regime, affirming this Wednesday that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “must have worried a lot.” “Nuclear talks with the United States are scheduled to be held in Muscat around 10 a.m. Friday,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on X.
The Trump administration has deployed an “armada” considerable in the Persian Gulf, consisting of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its carrier strike group, as well as around ten buildings. The American president has raised the specter of massive strikes, in the event of Tehran refusing dialogue. “I think (Ayatollah Khamenei) should be very worried right now. As you know, they are negotiating with us,” he told NBC this Wednesday.
Nuclear file
He also assured the channel that Iran was considering opening a new nuclear site, after the American bombing of the main installations during Operation “Midnight Hammer” in June 2025. “They were thinking about opening a new site elsewhere in the country (…) We found out and I said, if you do that, we are going to do very hard things to you,” he asserted.
The head of American diplomacy Marco Rubio told the Axios website that the discussions were close to “to overturn”. “We thought we had set up a forum that had been approved in Türkiye. It was created by several partners who wanted to participate and be part of it. Yesterday I saw contradictory information from Iran, which claimed that it had not agreed. The question is therefore still under discussion”he said. If there are negotiations, the American delegation should be led by Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s main emissary to the four corners of the globe, from Syria to Russia.
And to recall Washington’s intransigence on the Iranian nuclear issue: “For the negotiations to actually achieve anything meaningful, they will need to include certain elements, including the range of their ballistic missiles, their support for terrorist organizations in the region, their nuclear program and the treatment of their own population.”
The United States wants to force the mullahs’ regime to bow down, while it continues to bloodily repress the demonstrations born at the end of December 2025, which constitute the biggest challenge to power since the overthrow of the shah in 1979. If the White House threatens to strike Iran, Tehran has raised the possibility of targeting warships and American bases in the region. This Wednesday, an American F-35C plane shot down an Iranian Shahed drone near the USS Abraham-Lincoln.
