Iran's president has instructed his top diplomat to "pursue fair and equitable negotiations" with the U.S., in the first clear sign Tehran seeks to talk amid high tensions following a crackdown on protests last month.
The announcement Tuesday marked a major turn for reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian, who had broadly warned Iranians for weeks that the turmoil in his country had gone beyond his control.
It also signals that the president received support from Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for talks that the 86-year-old cleric had previously dismissed.
Türkiye had been working behind the scenes to make the talks happen there later this week as U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff is traveling in the region.
But whether Iran and the U.S. can reach an agreement remains to be seen, particularly after President Donald Trump included Iran's nuclear program in a list of demands from Tehran in any talks. Trump ordered the bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites during the 12-day war Israel launched against Iran in June.
Writing on X, Pezeshkian said in English and Farsi that the decision came after "requests from friendly governments in the region to respond to the proposal by the President of the United States for negotiations."
"I have instructed my Minister of Foreign Affairs, provided that a suitable environment exists – one free from threats and unreasonable expectations – to pursue fair and equitable negotiations, guided by the principles of dignity, prudence, and expediency,” he said.
The U.S. has yet to acknowledge that the talks will take place. A semiofficial news agency in Iran on Monday reported – then later deleted without explanation – that Pezeshkian had issued such an order to Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who held multiple rounds of talks with Witkoff before the 12-day war.
Late Monday, the pan-Arab satellite channel Al Mayadeen, which is politically allied with the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah, aired an interview with Ali Shamkhani, a top Khamenei adviser on security.
Shamkhani, who now sits on the country’s Supreme National Security Council and who in the 1980s led Iran's navy, wore a naval uniform as he spoke.
He suggested that if the talks happened, they would be indirect at the beginning, then moving to direct talks if a deal appeared to be attainable. Direct talks with the U.S. long have been a highly charged political issue within Iran's theocracy, with reformists like Pezeshkian pushing for them and hard-liners dismissing them.
The talks would solely focus on nuclear issues, he added.
Asked about whether Russia could take Iran's enriched uranium as it did in Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Shamkhani dismissed the idea, saying there was "no reason” to do so.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Monday that Russia had "long offered these services as a possible option that would alleviate certain irritants for a number of countries."
"Iran does not seek nuclear weapons, will not seek a nuclear weapon and will never stockpile nuclear weapons, but the other side must pay a price in return for this," he said.
Iran had been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels. The International Atomic Energy Agency had said Iran was the only country in the world to enrich to that level that wasn't armed with the bomb.
Iran has been refusing requests by the IAEA to inspect the sites bombed in the June war.
"The quantity of enriched uranium remains unknown, because part of the stockpile is under rubble, and there is no initiative yet to extract it, as it is extremely dangerous," Shamkhani said.
Witkoff is expected to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli security officials Tuesday, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly about the talks and spoke on condition of anonymity.
While in Israel, Witkoff will meet with the head of the Mossad intelligence service and the Israeli military's chief of staff, according to another official who was not authorized to speak to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Israel is expected to ask that any agreement with Iran include removing enriched uranium from the country, stopping the enrichment of uranium, limiting the creation of ballistic missiles and ending support for Tehran's proxies.
However, Shakhani in his interview rejected giving up uranium enrichment – a major obstacle in earlier talks with the U.S. In November, Araghchi said Iran was doing no enrichment in the country because of the U.S. bombing of the nuclear sites.
Witkoff later will travel to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, later in the week for Russia-Ukraine talks, the official said.
"We have talks going on with Iran, we’ll see how it all works out," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. Asked what his threshold was for military action against Iran, he declined to elaborate.
"I’d like to see a deal negotiated," Trump said. "Right now, we’re talking to them, we’re talking to Iran, and if we could work something out, that’d be great. And if we can’t, probably bad things would happen."
Mike Pompeo, a hard-liner on Iran who served as CIA director and secretary of state in Trump's first term, said it was "unimaginable that there can be a deal."
"I think they may come away with some set of understandings," Pompeo said at Dubai's World Governments Summit. "But to think that there’s a long-term solution that actually provides stability and peace to this region while the ayatollah is still in power is something I pray for but find unimaginable."
