US President Donald Trump on Tuesday declared it was “too late” for Iran to seek talks, saying the country’s “air defence, Air Force, Navy, and leadership” had been effectively destroyed in US-Israeli strikes, even as he insisted Washington had “unlimited” high-end weaponry and the capability to sustain operations against Tehran far beyond current projections.
“Their air defence, Air Force, Navy, and Leadership is gone. They want to talk. I said ‘Too Late!’” Trump wrote in a post on X, casting the US-led assault as having decisively crippled Iran’s military command structure.
In a separate post, reacting to an opinion piece, he also wrote that the United States has “unlimited mid to upper tier Weaponry – Brutal ‘stuff’” and dismissed a Wall Street Journal article on the administration’s military posture as inaccurate.
“Have unlimited mid to upper tier Weaponry – Brutal “stuff.” Wall Street Journal story was wrong, and a disgrace,” he wrote.
Trump’s new hard line appeared to mark a shift from comments he made earlier in the campaign, when he suggested that the United States had “the capability to go far longer” than the projected four-to-five-week time frame for its military operations against Iran but left open the possibility of diplomacy alongside sustained pressure.
Those remarks now sit uneasily with Trump’s earlier signals of willingness to talk to Tehran.
On Sunday, he told in an interview that Iran’s new leadership had reached out and that he had agreed in principle to a dialogue, even as US and Israeli attacks continued and Iran launched retaliatory strikes on Israel and US targets in the region.
“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” Trump said in the interview from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long.”
Trump did not clarify at the time whom he expected to engage in those talks, particularly after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Saturday, leaving the country in political flux.
A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning, confirmed Trump’s willingness to talk but stressed that military operations would not pause.
The official said Iran had indicated it was prepared to open a channel to the president but declined to detail the nature or level of the outreach, adding that “the military assault against Iran would continue unabated.”
