Iran hails ‘encouraging signals’ from US ahead of nuclear talks in Geneva

⁠Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has said that nuclear talks with the United States have produced “encouraging signals”, but warned that Tehran is prepared for any scenario ahead of another round of negotiations set for Thursday.

His comments on Sunday came amid mounting fears of a military conflict, with Washington building up its military presence in the Gulf and US President Donald Trump warning of “really bad things” if no deal is reached on Tehran’s nuclear programme.

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“Iran is committed to peace and stability in the region,” Pezeshkian wrote on X.

“Recent negotiations involved the exchange of practical proposals and yielded encouraging signals. However, we continue to closely monitor US actions and have made all necessary preparations for any potential scenario,” he said.

The cautious optimism came after Oman’s minister of foreign affairs, Badr Al Busaidi, confirmed a third round of indirect talks between the two sides in Switzerland.

“Pleased to confirm US-Iran negotiations are now set for Geneva this Thursday, with a positive push to go the extra mile towards finalizing the deal,” said Al Busaidi, who acts as a mediator in indirect talks between Washington and Tehran.

Iran and the US resumed indirect talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme in Oman earlier this month, and held a second round in Geneva last week. Although Washington and Tehran described the talks in overall positive terms, they failed to achieve a significant breakthrough.

‘Why haven’t they capitulated?’

Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who leads nuclear negotiations for Washington, said on Saturday that the US president was curious as to ‌why Iran has not yet “capitulated” and agreed to curb its nuclear programme.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘frustrated’, because he understands he has plenty of alternatives, but he’s curious as to why they haven’t… I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated’, but why they haven’t capitulated,” Witkoff said during an interview with Fox News’s My View with Lara Trump, hosted by the US president’s daughter-in-law.

“Why, under this pressure – with the amount of seapower and naval power over there – why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do’? And yet, it’s sort of hard to get them to that place.”

According to US media, the airpower Washington is amassing in the region is the greatest since its invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the past few days alone, the US has deployed more than 120 aircraft to the Middle East, while the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, is on its way to join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group already positioned in the Arabian Sea.

Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi reacted to Witkoff’s comments in a post on X, saying: “Curious to know why we do not capitulate? Because we are Iranian.”

He also said ⁠in an interview with CBS that a diplomatic solution with the US was still within reach. He told the Face the Nation moderator, Margaret Brennan, that Iran’s nuclear programme was a matter of “dignity and pride” for Iranians.

“We have developed this technology by ourselves, by our scientists, and it is very dear to us because we have created it – we have paid a huge expense for that,” he said.

Araghchi cited among the costs two decades of US sanctions, the targeted killings of Iranian scientists, and US-Israeli attacks on nuclear facilities in June last year.

“We’re not going to give [our nuclear programme] up. There is no legal reason to do that while everything is peaceful and safeguarded” by the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Araghchi said.

As a “committed member” of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires non-nuclear-weapon states not to seek or acquire nuclear weapons, Iran is “ready to cooperate with the agency in full”, Araghchi added.