President Donald Trump said that the US military is reloading with “the best ammunition” to restart attacks on Iran if negotiations in Pakistan fail.
“We have a reset going. We’re loading up the ships with the best ammunition, the best weapons ever made, even better than what we did previously, and we blew them apart,” the US president said.
Trump’s comments to the New York Post were made just before Vice President JD Vance, who will lead the US negotiating team, left Washington for Islamabad.
Trump spoke shortly after Vice President JD Vance boarded Air Force Two en route to Islamabad, where he will be joined by special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to negotiate a final peace after a two-week cease-fire was reached on Tuesday.
“We’re loading up the ships with the best weapons ever made, even at a higher level than we use to do a complete decimation,” Trump was quoted as saying.
He added: “And if we don’t have a deal, we will be using them, and we will be using them very effectively.”
Trump questioned the Iranian negotiating team’s honesty. The foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and the parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, will represent Tehran.
He said the US was dealing with people “that we don’t know whether or not they tell the truth.”
Trump went on: “To our face, they’re getting rid of all nuclear weapons, everything’s gone. And then they go out to the press and say, ‘No, we’d like to enrich.’ So we’ll find out.”
Trump later posted on his Truth Social platform that the Iranians “don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other cards, other than a short-term extortion of the World by using International Waterways.” He said, “The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate!”
Minutes before that post, he said the Iranians were better at handling “the Fake News Media, and ‘Public Relations,’ than they are at fighting!”