The U.S. military action against Iran is “coming to an end”, President Donald Trump said Tuesday.
"We're doing great," Trump told NBC News in an interview. "And it's coming to an end."
Earlier on Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the next few days in the war against Iran would be decisive and warned Tehran that the conflict would intensify if it did not make a deal.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards hit back with a new threat against U.S. companies in the region starting Wednesday. It listed 18 businesses including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, IBM, Tesla and Boeing. Hegseth, who reported he visited U.S. troops in the Middle East on Saturday, said President Donald Trump was willing to make a deal with Iran to end the war. Talks were ongoing and gaining strength, but the U.S. was prepared to continue the war if Iran did not comply, he said.
"We have more and more options, and they have less... in only one month we set the terms, the upcoming days will be decisive," Hegseth said in Washington. "Iran knows that, and there's almost nothing they can militarily do about it."
Responding to the threat against American corporate interests, a White House official said the U.S. military was "prepared to curtail any attacks."
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Tuesday he has been receiving direct messages from U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff but they do not constitute "negotiations", Qatar's Al Jazeera TV cited him as saying. The messages include threats or exchanged views delivered through "friends", he added. The month-long conflict has spread across the region, killing thousands, disrupting energy supplies and threatening to send the global economy into a tailspin.
Trump threatened on Monday to obliterate Iran's energy plants if it does not agree to a peace deal and open the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for global oil shipments that has effectively been blocked by Iran.
The U.S. president on Tuesday criticized countries that have not helped the U.S. war effort, such as Britain. In a social media post, he said that in response to the global fuel shortage, these countries should buy energy from the U.S. or find "some delayed courage, go to the strait and just TAKE IT".
France and Italy have pushed back against some U.S.-Israeli military operations, sources said, highlighting how divisions between NATO allies have been exposed by the war.
Pope Leo urged Trump on Tuesday to look for an "off-ramp" to the war, in an unusual direct appeal from the pontiff to the president.
"Hopefully he's looking for a way to decrease the amount of violence," the pope told journalists outside his residence near Rome.
