On the afternoon of March 8, 2025, Iranian regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei publicly responded to the U.S. president’s letter proposing negotiations, which had been publicized the day before. And Khamenei rejected it.
Khamenei said: “Some bullying governments insist on negotiations. Their negotiations are not to solve issues but to dictate. For them, negotiation is a way to present new demands; the issue is not just the nuclear issue that they are now talking about. They raise new demands that Iran will certainly not meet.”
He defined the new demands in the proposed negotiations as “the country’s defense capabilities” (i.e., the regime’s missile program) and “the country’s international capabilities” (i.e., the regime’s proxy forces and its efforts to export terrorism and fundamentalism), adding: They say, “Don’t do this, don’t see so-and-so, don’t go there, don’t produce that, your missile’s range should not be more than that. Negotiation is for these things.”
The supreme leader of the regime, who was speaking to a gathering of heads of the three branches of government and leaders and officials of the regime from various factions and people like Javad Zarif to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also spoke of “public opinion pressure” and added: “They also raise the issue of negotiation repeatedly in order to put pressure on public opinion that yes, the other side is ready to negotiate, why are you not ready to negotiate?” And he immediately added: “It is not negotiation, it is dictation, it is imposition, in addition to other aspects that are not the place to discuss here.”
While the regime’s television camera zoomed in on Hassan Rouhani, Khamenei complained about the joint statements of Germany, England, and France at the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, saying: “Now those three European countries are also issuing statements declaring that Iran has not fulfilled its nuclear obligations under the JCPOA [Iran nuclear deal]. Let one of them ask if you have fulfilled your obligations? You did not fulfill them from day one, and after the US left, you promised to somehow compensate, you broke your promise, and then you said something else, and you broke that second promise as well. That is shameless.”
Khamenei then concluded and emphasized that for his crisis-stricken regime, “There is no way to stand against force or bullying now.”
This position of Khamenei came after the US president, in an interview with Fox Business television that aired on March 7, 2025, said that he had sent a letter to Iran’s regime and gave them two options: “There are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal. I would prefer to make a deal, because I’m not looking to hurt Iran.”
On Friday, Trump told reporters that the U.S. is “down to the final moments” negotiating with Iran, and that he hoped military intervention would prove unnecessary. “It’s an interesting time in the history of the world. But we have a situation with Iran that something is going to happen very soon, very, very soon,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “You’ll be talking about that pretty soon, I guess. Hopefully, we can have a peace deal. I’m not speaking out of strength or weakness, I’m just saying I’d rather see a peace deal than the other. But the other will solve the problem.”