US and Iranian officials kicked off a fresh round of indirect talks in Switzerland Thursday, as President Trump’s deadline to reach an agreement on the future of Tehran’s nuclear program looms as soon as this weekend.
The American and Iranian delegations arrived separately at the Omani diplomatic residence on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Oman’s Foreign Ministry later published images of US special Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, meeting with Omani Foreign Minister Bader al-Busaidi to go over the Iranian proposals.
“We’ve been exchanging creative and positive ideas in Geneva today, and now both US and Iranian negotiators have adjourned for a break,” al-Busaidi posted on X at 1:30 p.m. local time Thursday. “We’ll resume later today. We hope to make more progress.”
Thursday’s meeting is taking place exactly one week after Trump told a meeting of his Board of Peace in Washington that he would decided whether to hit the theocratic regime “over the next, probably, 10 days.”
During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address to Congress, the president warned that Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” among other “sinister designs.”
“We are in negotiations with them,” Trump said. “They want to make a deal but we haven’t heard those sacred words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’”
US officials have pushed to broaden the talks to include discussions of Iran’s ballistic missile program as well as the regime’s killing of thousands of protesters last month — but Tehran has refused to be drawn on those topics.
Ali Shamkhani, a prominent adviser to Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote on X ahead of Thursday’s talks that “[i]f the main issue of the negotiations is Iran’s non-development of nuclear weapons, this is consistent with the Supreme Leader’s fatwa [religious declaration] and Iran’s defense doctrine, and an immediate agreement is within reach.”
Meanwhile, Trump has ordered two US aircraft carrier groups into position for possible strikes. One carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, and its accompanying strike group, has been in the Middle East since late January.
A second carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford is currently en route to Israel’s Mediterranean coast from the Greek island of Crete.
