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Trump vows to quickly achieve deals with Iran, N. Korea if re-elected

Speaking about Iran, Trump said the Islamic Republic "is dying to make a deal" with the United States

WASHINGTON, August 8. /TASS/. US President Donald Trump said that if re-elected, he would achieve agreements with Iran and North Korea ‘very quickly.’

"If and when we win, we will make deals with Iran very quickly. We'll make deals with North Korea very quickly," the US leader told reporters in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Friday.

"If I didn’t win the election in 2016, our country would be - maybe it would be over by now - in war with North Korea," he continued. "You would have been at war with North Korea, and it would have been a very bad war."

"And we have relationship with North Korea, which is something <…> never established by the previous administration," Trump added.

Speaking about Iran, Trump said the Islamic Republic "is dying to make a deal" with the United States.

The first-ever US-North Korea summit took place in Singapore on June 12, 2018, when US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed a joint declaration. Pyongyang undertook certain denuclearization commitments in exchange for security guarantees from Washington. Another US-North Korean summit in Hanoi in February 2019 turned futile. The two leaders had a brief meeting in Panmunjeom, a village on the border between two Koreas, on June 30, 2019 and agreed to resume working-level consultations on denuclearization. Under this agreement, US and North Korean delegations met in Stockholm on October 5 to discuss ways to normalize bilateral relations. However they failed to establish dialogue.

Relations between the United States and Iran deteriorated sharply following Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program on May 8, 2018 and resumption of US economic sanctions against Tehran, including in the oil export sphere. At the same time, Trump said on many occasions he was ready to resume dialogue with the Iranian authorities. In his words, Washington would like to see the JCPOA deal replaced with another agreement to encompass not only Iran’s nuclear program, but also a wide range of other issues, such as Tehran’s missile program and regional policies.