Donald Trump says he has not made a final decision on whether to launch strikes on Iran but is “not happy” with the situation and military force – including regime change – remains an option.
The remarks came at the White House on Friday after talks between the US and Iran on Tehran’s nuclear programme ended inconclusively, with a suggestion that further discussions would be held next week.
Trump told reporters he favoured diplomacy but repeated his insistence that Iran could not possess a nuclear weapon. “It’d be wonderful if they negotiated in … good faith and conscience but they are not getting there so far,” he said.
Asked whether US strikes could lead to regime change in Iran, he said: “Nobody knows. There might be, and there might not be. [It would be] nice if we could do it without but sometimes you have to do it.”
The US has authorised the departure of non-essential government workers and their families from Israel as the threat of an American strike on Iran looms.
US citizens should “consider leaving Israel while commercial flights are available”, the Department of State advisory added. It also urged against travel to Israel.
The US has assembled two carrier strike groups ready to attack if Trump decides Iran is not serious about ending its nuclear activities.
The Department of State warning was supplemented by a message to US embassy staff from the ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, urging those that wanted to leave to “do so TODAY”.
Huckabee contacted embassy staff in an email sent at 12.04am local time, urging them to book flights anywhere they could.
This move “will likely result in high demand for airline seats today”, he wrote. “Focus on getting a seat to any place from which you can then continue travel to DC, but the first priority will be getting expeditiously out of the country.”
The UK said on Friday it had temporarily withdrawn its staff from Iran, citing the security situation in the region. The Foreign Office said its ability to assist British nationals was now extremely limited, with the embassy operating remotely and no in-person consular support available even in emergencies.
The US call to leave Israel came as Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, the key mediator in the talks between the US and Iran, flew to Washington in what looked increasingly like a last-ditch effort to persuade the Trump administration to hold back. He was due to brief JD Vance, the US vice-president, and make the case that enough progress had been made in the talks to warrant caution.
The urgency of his visit, hours after talks between Iran and the US ended in Geneva on Thursday evening, suggested he believed he needed to act quickly to counter those making the case for a military intervention.
In a sign that large gaps exist between the two sides, the Iranian leadership called on the US to drop its toughest demands. The US negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, ominously issued no statement after the talks.
Vance is reputedly the senior member of the administration most opposed to military interventions and Albusaidi’s task is to try to convince him that a swift military strike will not change Iran’s basic negotiating stance.
However, Washington has formally announced that Marco Rubio will travel to Israel for meetings early next week. It is unlikely Israel or the US would launch a strike on Iran while the secretary of state is in Israel because of the expectation of an Iranian counterattack on the country.
Rubio is expected to meet Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, along with other senior Israeli officials. Rubio will travel to Israel on Monday and Tuesday, but in a rare departure from previous trips will not be taking reporters with him. The Department of State did not specify why reporters would not be on the trip.
“The secretary will discuss a range of regional priorities including Iran, Lebanon, and ongoing efforts to implement President Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza,” said Tommy Piggott, the principal deputy spokesperson for the department.
On Friday night Rubio said that he had designated Iran as a state sponsor of wrongful detention. “The Iranian regime must stop taking hostages and release all Americans unjustly detained in Iran, steps that could end this designation and associated actions,” he said.
Washington earlier denied reports that US embassies in Iraq and Kuwait had received orders for the evacuation of non-essential personnel. The reports of the evacuations – strenuously denied by US officials on Friday – were seen as another indication that the US was preparing an imminent strike against Iran.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Vance said he did not know whether Trump would back a military strike, but said the US could engage in limited strikes in the region without ending up in a forever war.
“I do think we have to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past,” Vance said. “I also think we have to avoid over-learning the lessons of the past. Just because one president screwed up a military conflict doesn’t mean we can never engage in military conflict again.”
“We’ve got to be careful about it, but I think the president is being careful,” he added.
Iran has held out against Washington’s demand to export its highly enriched uranium stockpile to the US and says it is not willing to end altogether its right to enrich uranium domestically. The Iranian parliament passed a law last July that banned cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and required a recognition of Iran’s “right to enrich” before inspectors could return.
In a report for an IAEA board meeting next week, officials confirmed they had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the 400kg of highly enriched uranium inside Iran, adding: “It is critical to have access without delay.” The report said it was particularly disturbing that the IAEA had never had access to an enrichment facility in Isfahan, which was declared for the first time in June.
The IAEA also reported that through the analysis of commercially available satellite imagery, it had observed “activities being conducted at some of the affected nuclear facilities, including the enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow”, but added that “without access to these facilities it is not possible for the agency to confirm the nature and the purpose of the activities”.
Iran has said it would commit to needs-based enrichment and for now would require only 20% or lower purity levels at its Tehran research reactor. The fuel for this reactor comes from Russia.
The site mainly makes medical isotopes used to diagnose illnesses such as heart disease. Iran’s three main nuclear facilities were destroyed by US bombing last June.
Iran also has a largely Russian-built facility at Bushehr on the Gulf coast. The first civilian nuclear power plant in the Middle East, it is also supplied with Russian fuel.
The separate issue of its 400kg stockpile of highly enriched uranium at 60% could be addressed by diluting or “downblending” it, as happened under the 2015 nuclear agreement.
The two sides are scheduled to meet next week at technical level in Vienna at the headquarters of the IAEA, the UN-affiliated body that would be required to verify Iranian compliance.
