WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump is interested in calling on Arab countries to pay for the cost of the Iran war, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday, adding talks with Tehran to end the conflict are progressing well.
Leavitt, asked at a news briefing whether Arab countries would step up to help pay for the war, said she would not get ahead of the Republican president but that it was an idea that Trump had.
“I think it’s something the President would be quite interested in calling them to do,” Leavitt said.
“It’s an idea that I know that he has and something that I think you’ll hear more from him on.”
Leavitt said that what Tehran says publicly differs from what it tells U.S. officials in private and that Iran had privately agreed to some of Washington’s points.
“Despite all of the public posturing you hear from the regime and false reporting, talks are continuing and going well. What is said publicly is, of course, much different than what’s being communicated to us privately,” Leavitt said.
Trump earlier on Monday warned that Iran’s energy plants and oil wells would be obliterated if it did not open the Strait of Hormuz, after Tehran described U.S. peace proposals as “unrealistic” and fired waves of missiles at Israel.
‘REGIME CHANGE’
Trump has said that negotiations with Tehran were going well and suggested that “regime change” in Iran is complete.
“We’ve had regime change, if you look, already, because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people,” Trump told reporters on Sunday.
“So I would consider that regime change, and frankly, they’ve been very reasonable.”
But U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Good Morning America on Monday that while it would be good news if Iran had new leadership and people in charge “who have a more reasonable vision of the future,” the U.S. also had to “be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case.”
Leavitt, asked on Monday how the U.S. will ensure it is making a deal with people who can implement it, warned that anything Iran says to Washington privately will be tested and that the U.S. would ensure that Tehran is held accountable.
“If they are not, the President has laid out the military consequences that the Iranian regime will see if they don’t hold true to the words that we are hearing privately behind the scenes,” she said.
(Reporting by Bo Erickson, Ryan Patrick Jones and Trevor Hunnicutt; Writing by Daphne Psaledakis, editing by Michelle Nichols and Deepa Babington)
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