Walid Phares to Newsmax: Iran Wants to Buy Time, Not Strike Deal

Iran does not want to make a nuclear deal with the U.S. but is looking to gain time, former Trump foreign policy adviser Walid Phares said Wednesday on Newsmax.

"There is a decision by the Trump administration to keep trying to cut a deal. And the negotiations are about the deal. That's what envoy [Steve] Witkoff is doing," Phares said on "Newsline." "But at the same time, we can guess already from the past 48 hours that the leadership of the Islamic regime in Iran, they want to make the illusion that they want to go to a deal.

"But what they're trying to do, in fact, is gain time. They are embarked in a strategy that would gain them four years or maybe three years and a half. It would be in the last year elections or two years until our midterm elections. They do not believe they can make all these concessions and still survive their own population, their own revolution."

Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday criticized an initial proposal from the U.S. in negotiations over Tehran's rapidly advancing nuclear program, though he stopped short of entirely rejecting the possibility of an agreement.

"There is one point that is a key element in the nuclear industry, and that is uranium enrichment. A nuclear industry without enrichment capabilities is useless because we would then be dependent on others to obtain fuel for our power plants," he said.

The U.S. demand to give up enriching uranium in any possible deal, he added, would make Iran reliant on other countries for nuclear fuel and material.

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