US President Donald Trump says he would be “honored” to meet Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei, newly-elected Leader of the Islamic Revolution, if a deal is reached to end the war between the two countries.
“I’d be honored to meet him,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, adding, “If we make a deal, it’s possible that I would meet… I’d be okay with that.”
The remarks come weeks after Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei was elected Leader of the Islamic Revolution by Iran’s Assembly of Experts, following the martyrdom of his father, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, in a cowardly US-Israeli strike targeting his residence in Tehran on February 28.
The Assembly convened in an emergency session three days later and elected Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei — a senior cleric long active in religious and political affairs — in a vote that drew widespread support across Iran.
Trump’s expression of willingness to meet the new Leader marks a notable shift in tone, even as Washington continues to impose an illegal naval blockade on Iranian vessels and ports. Tehran has repeatedly slammed the act as a violation of ceasefire which took effect on April 8 in Islamabad.
Avoiding ‘Jimmy Carter’ moment
Also on Thursday, Trump claimed that he had considered and ultimately rejected a covert special operations mission to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile, citing the risks of a prolonged presence in a war zone.
“There was a time at the very beginning when we thought about doing that, because they would have not been watching, but they would have found out,” he said.
Trump invoked the memory of the 1980 failed US mission in Iran — widely associated with President Jimmy Carter’s political downfall — as the reason he stepped back.
“I didn’t want to be Jimmy Carter. I didn’t feel like being Jimmy Carter,” he told reporters, adding that retrieving Iran’s uranium would require weeks on the ground with heavy equipment.
“It’s not like Venezuela, like you go in, you’re there for a matter of minutes and you’re out and everybody’s waving goodbye,” Trump said. “You need massive equipment to airlift the equipment, and you’re in a war zone.”
His remarks comes as the US faced a strategic defeat in April following an attempt to have American troops in Isfahan, in early April.
According to exclusive details shared with Press TV, the US and possibly Israeli forces conducted extensive aerial reconnaissance ahead of the raid, during which they lost several aircraft, including at least one A-10 Thunderbolt II and two Black Hawk helicopters.
These initial operations set the stage for a disastrous mission orchestrated by the White House.
