NEW YORK — President Donald Trump offered to make a deal with Iran, threatened to obliterate it if it killed him, and ordered "maximum" pressure to shut its oil lifeline -- all in a matter of head-spinning hours.
"I say this to Iran, who's listening very intently, 'I would love to be able to make a great deal. A deal where you can get on with your lives’", Trump said on Tuesday at the White House while signing a memorandum on re-imposing "maximum economic pressure".
But, he said, "they cannot have one thing -- they cannot have a nuclear weapon".
"I think that's going to be very unfortunate for them" if they have one, he said.
The offer to make a deal is a turn-around from his first term action to kill the multinational deal to curb its nuclear weapons programme.
Later, he said that he had left instructions to obliterate Iran if it were to assassinate him.
US officials have said even before Trump assumed the presidency that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards had plotted to kill him and arrested three men in New York and charged them in a murder-for-hire plot against him.
Speaking at a news conference with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, he said that if Iran assassinated him, "that would be the end".
"I've left instructions", he said, "if they do it, they get obliterated. There won't be anything left".
He said that he wanted to put the maximum pressure on Iran to end its oil exports, an economic lifeline.
"Today, I also took action to restore a maximum pressure policy on the Iranian regime, and we will once again enforce the most aggressive possible sanctions, drive Iranian oil exports to zero, and diminish the regime's capacity to fund terror throughout the region and throughout the world", he said.
Trump's offer to make a deal with Iran is in keeping with his unconventional diplomatic strategies.
During his first term, he met with North Korea's dictator Kim Jong-un three times but failed to work out an arrangement for Pyongyang to give up its nuclear programme.
Iran is at a vulnerable point after the overthrow of its ally, Syria's former President Bashar al-Assad and the rout of its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, curtailing its reach across the Middle East.
It also has a new President, Masoud Pezeshkian, who succeeded Ebrahim Raisi after his death in a helicopter crash.
But Trump in his last term withdrew from a deal made by the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the European Union, and Germany for Iran to end its nuclear bomb programme in exchange for loosening sanctions.
The killing of the deal resulted in Iran resuming enriching uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons.