US President Donald Trump threatened Iran on Wednesday with an attack “far worse” than the strikes he had ordered against its nuclear sites in June if Tehran doesn’t agree to a deal to curb its nuclear programme.
“A massive Armada is heading to Iran. It is moving quickly, with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose. It is a larger fleet, headed by the great Aircraft Carrier Abraham Lincoln, than that sent to Venezuela. Like with Venezuela, it is, ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission, with speed and violence, if necessary,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
“Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal — NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS — one that is good for all parties. Time is running out, it is truly of the essence!”
Trump said that if Iran did not come to an agreement with the United States, the US could carry out an attack worse than its previous one in June, when it hit multiple nuclear sites with bunker busting bombs.
“As I told Iran once before, MAKE A DEAL! They didn’t, and there was ‘Operation Midnight Hammer,’ a major destruction of Iran. The next attack will be far worse! Don’t make that happen again. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump said Wednesday.
The warning came as the USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier Strike Group, which includes the carrier and three destroyers, had crossed into the US military’s Central Command area of responsibility, which includes the Middle East and the waters around Iran, though it had not necessarily reached its intended final deployment location.
Activists say more than 30,000 people were killed during the recent unrest in Iran.
The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, told the Senate on Wednesday that thousands had been killed and said the Iranian government was “probably weaker than it has ever been” since the 1979 revolution.
Meanwhile, a top adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in posts on social media in Hebrew said that the Tehran regime will attack Tel Aviv in response to any strike from the United States. “The limited strike is an illusion,” Ali Shamkhani wrote on X.
“Any military activity from America, from any source and at any level, will be considered the beginning of a war, and the response will be immediate, comprehensive and without precedent, and will be directed at the aggressor, to the heart of Tel Aviv and all of its supporters.”
In December, Shamkhani posted on X, “Any aggression will face an immediate #Harsh_Response beyond its planners’ imagination.”
Rubio told the Senate that around 30,000 US military personnel were “within the reach of an array of thousands of Iranian one-way UAVs and Iranian short-range ballistic missiles that threaten our troop presence. We have to have enough personnel in the region … to defend against that possibility.”
Trump would also maintain the “preemptive defensive option” of striking Iran if there were indications that it was planning an attack on US troops, he said. “They certainly have the capability because they’ve amassed thousands and thousands of ballistic missiles that they’ve built.”
The Gulf States and Turkey have been speaking to both sides, trying to find common ground between Iran and the US, but Tehran has said it will not negotiate under duress or with preconditions.
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that a deal with Iran ought to happen. He told CNBC: “Obviously, the deal has to do with missiles. It has to do with enrichment. It has to do with non-state actor proxies. It has to do with [Iran’s stockpile of nuclear] material.”
According to reports, President Trump is interested in curbing not just Iran’s nuclear programme but also its ability to fire long-range missiles, seen as the centrepiece of Iranian military projection.
In recent weeks Trump has also suggested Khamenei must leave the world stage, a demand Iran will reject.
Asked by Senator John Cornyn about the potential for a change of regime in Iran, Rubio said: “You’re talking about a regime that’s been in place for a very long time … So that’s going to require a lot of careful thinking, if that eventuality ever presents itself. I don’t think anyone can give you a simple answer to what happens next in Iran if the supreme leader and the regime were to fall.”
