Donald Trump says US could withdraw from Iran ‘whether we have a deal or not’

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Donald Trump said the US could end its war in Iran within “two or three weeks” even if no peace deal was reached, in the strongest sign yet of the president’s growing impatience with a conflict that has roiled markets.

“We’ll leave whether we have a deal or not. It’s irrelevant,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office late on Tuesday. The US would do so within “two or three weeks” though a deal between Washington and Tehran was possible before then, he said.

The president’s remarks at a White House event came just hours after Brent, the international oil benchmark, settled at $118.35 a barrel, near its highest level since the start of the war a month ago.

Now in its fifth week, the conflict has sparked a global energy crisis that has threatened to unleash a fresh bout of inflation and eroded Trump’s hopes of convincing Americans that he will be able to extinguish a painful cost-of-living crisis before November’s midterm elections.

The war is already exerting a heavy toll on US consumers and businesses. The average US price for petrol at the pump hit $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022 on Tuesday, while diesel, the lifeblood of industry, has jumped to almost $5.50 a gallon.

Despite growing pressure on the White House both politically and economically to end the war, the Pentagon has continued with its build-up of forces in the Middle East.

Trump said on Tuesday that before ending the military engagement, he would still “want to knock out every single thing there”.

“They don’t have to make a deal with me when we feel that they are . . . put into the Stone Ages” without being able to “come up with a nuclear weapon”, he said.

Marco Rubio, US secretary of state, told Fox News on Tuesday night that a possibility of meeting with Tehran remained. “There is the potential for direct meeting at some point. We’re always going to be open for that.”

Rubio’s comments came after Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s president, reiterated that his country was open to ending the war, but only if it received “guarantees” that US-Israeli aggression would not be repeated.

Pezeshkian’s remarks helped fuel a sharp rally in Wall Street equities on Tuesday, as some traders bet that the war would end sooner than they had previously anticipated.

Still, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth refused to rule out putting soldiers on the ground in Iran, saying earlier in the day that “the point is to be unpredictable” in terms of “what you’re willing to do or not do”.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump would address the nation at 900pm on Wednesday “to provide an important update on Iran”, the first time he has delivered such a primetime address since the war started.

Last week the president set a deadline of April 6 for Iran to reach a deal with the US or face more devastating strikes on its energy infrastructure. However, there have been few indications of progress after Tehran last week rejected a 15-point peace proposal from the US and talks between the two countries continue through third parties.

In a note to clients on Monday, Beacon Policy Advisors, a consultancy in Washington, said: “There continues to be no apparent progress toward a negotiated solution [and] with the building economic and domestic political pressure on Trump, the president will likely have to face a decision between walking away from the conflict or escalating the conflict.”

The Trump administration’s rationale for going to war against Iran has shifted throughout the conflict, prompting uncertainty among investors about what the US would need to achieve before withdrawing.

On Tuesday, Trump said his “one goal” was to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“Regime change was not one of the things I had as a goal,” he said, though in recent days he and his top lieutenants have touted that regime change had already been achieved.

Rubio laid out the administration’s objectives in a video released by the White House on Tuesday.

Explaining the timing of the war, he claimed that Iran was seeking to build a shield of drones and missiles so formidable that US strikes on the country’s nuclear programme would have become impossible.

“We were on the verge of an Iran that has so many missiles and so many drones that no one could do anything about their nuclear weapons programme in the future,” Rubio said.