Trump says US may follow Israel on striking Iran if nuclear talks don’t progress

President Donald Trump told reporters in the White House Wednesday that he may join Israel in launching a strike against Iran if nuclear talks continue to stagnate.

Trump said that military action alongside Israel was an option “if necessary” amid his push to get Iran to the negotiating table on its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The comments come two days after Trump revealed in a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. would have high-level talks with Iran on Saturday.

“If it requires military, we are going to have military. Israel will obviously be very involved in that — be the leader of that,” Trump told reporters. 

Trump reportedly gave a two-month deadline to the Islamic Republic to negotiate a nuclear deal in a letter sent to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on March 12, according to Axios. Khamenei called the letter a “deception” meant to give the impression that Iran was not open to negotiating with America.

The U.S. military has drastically increased its presence around Iran, deploying a handful of B-2 stealth bombers to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and extending the deployment of a naval strike group to the Red Sea led by the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier.

The assets have mostly been used in strikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. In order to avoid attacks from the rebels, commercial ships spend nearly $1 million extra in fuel while adding roughly two weeks of transit time around Africa.

Houthis have also hit U.S. naval vessels around 170 times since 2023.

Iran can make a nuclear weapon with its stockpiles of 60% enriched uranium in just one week, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a March 2025 bulletin. Trump backed out of the previous Obama-era nuclear deal in 2018, which was criticized for being too soft on Iran by lacking a perpetual ban on the country’s nuclearization.