US President Donald Trump spoke to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday about the ongoing negotiations with Iran, at an event marking the launch of Trump Accounts, saying, "We're going to make a deal, or we're going to finish the job."
The president said, "We freed up the blockade because we're close to maybe making a deal - I don't know, look - we're going to win one way or the other."
He then went on to say, "It won't be tough to finish the job. I'd rather make a deal, because I don't want to affect 91 million people. We can knock down their bridges in one hour; we can knock out their energy supply, all of those big plants that they built - big, beautiful, modern plants; they had a lot of money.
"They don't have any money now. We haven't given them any money, but we can knock out their electricity and power-generating plants, I would say in the small part of an afternoon. Every plant will be gone, and they know that."
Trump on war goals: nuclear deterrence, regime change
"Oil is now at a level that, I think it's even lower, on a barrel basis, than it was before we started. We’ve gotten concessions, and they have to hold those concessions, but there'll be no nuclear weapon. We’re going to be getting the, as I call it, dust; the enriched material," the president said.
"I went in for one reason - very strongly - that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I'm not looking for regime change, although this is regime change. The first regime is gone, the second regime is gone, and I think the third regime is more reasonable, but we'll find out."
Secret mission kept oil prices low
Trump then went on to say, "We've destroyed - completely destroyed - they had 159 ships, every single ship is at the bottom of the sea. We've completely destroyed - they don't have one airplane - they don't have radar."
He went on to describe previously classified operations that snuck ships out of the Strait of Hormuz during the blockade.
"A lot of people said oil can go to $300-350 a barrel. One of the reasons our prediction wasn't right is because we were taking out an average of 10 [oil tankers], sometimes less, sometimes more, three weeks ago we had 22 ships [come] out of the Strait - the famous Strait of Hormuz [that] nobody ever heard of - but that is some big money machine, I'll tell you what, when you look at the numbers... that makes everything look small," he said.
"We took out so much oil that people didn't know. And it only took a month and a half."
President Trump continued, saying, "They finally found out; they had no radar because their radar was destroyed, so we took them out late at night with no lights, with no nothing, and our great Navy, which did the greatest blockade anyone has seen, not one ship got through in two months."
The president claimed in June that the United States secured the passage of more than 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, via at least 200 commercial vessels.