Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, President Donald Trump said his red line for resuming military action in Iran would be if he didn’t believe the parties could reach a deal in a timely manner, and said U.S. forces could be deployed into Iran to retrieve and destroy the regime’s stockpile of enriched uranium.

Trump continued to assert that Iran is desperate for a deal, even as negotiations appear largely deadlocked and as Esmaeil Baghaei, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told CNN in Tehran on Sunday that the primary obstacle to an agreement is Washington’s changing and “contradictory” positions. Meanwhile, U.S. and Iranian forces continue to exchange strikes nearly daily around the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump ruled out the prospect of unfreezing any Iranian assets or offering upfront sanctions relief to secure a breakthrough, maintaining that compliance must precede concessions.

“If they behave, if they do a good job, we start talking,” Trump said. But should Iran walk away from the table or drag out the timeline, the president emphasized he would not rule out a return to hostilities.

“My red line would be if I think I wasn’t going to make a deal, or if I wasn’t going to make a deal fast enough,” Trump said of resuming military action, noting that if Iran were to kill additional Americans — more than a dozen U.S. troops have already been killed in the current conflict — that would be “something that I would think about very seriously.”

“We’re having very good negotiations with the people that are leading the country now. It’s the third group that we’ve been dealing with. And they are different. And you could say it’s regime change actually because these are very different people. I find them to be more rational, very smart,” he added. 

Trump specifically noted that he considers Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei — the son of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — a more “rational” negotiating partner. 

“I think [he is] more rational. He’s pretty badly injured. So there’s a certain bravery there,” Trump said. “A lot of people, if they were injured that badly, they wouldn’t be talking about, you know, ‘How are we doing with the United States?’ They’d have other things on their mind. So there’s a certain bravery there. But he is very seriously injured.”

The president further said U.S. forces could be sent into Iranian territory to secure the regime’s nuclear stockpiles, claiming that Washington knows exactly where the material is stored. 

“The way you do it is if we make a deal now, we’re friendly, we’ll all go together. It’ll be our equipment. We’ll take it out and destroy it, whether it’s onsite or whether we take it offsite,” Trump explained. “We will be at peace. And we will go with them, or without them. But we won’t have people shooting at us, okay?”

He added: “Now, if we don’t make a deal, then we’re going to take them out militarily very harshly. And we’ll wait until we do that before we go, in which case we’ll have safety either way.”

Trump further claimed that the U.S. possesses highly specific data on Iran’s remaining military capabilities, including the locations of its drones, manufacturing plants, remaining missiles and launch sites. While the president stated that the majority of Iran’s production facilities “have been knocked out,” he acknowledged that Tehran still maintains some of its arsenal.

“I know almost the number, and we know where they are too, and we know where their drones are, and we know where their drone factories are,” Trump said. “Most of the drone factories have been knocked out, most of the launching pads have been knocked out and most of the missile manufacturing areas have been knocked out. But they still have capacity. They have some missiles, they have some drones. I would say percentage wise, maybe 21-22% of their missiles. It’s a lot of missiles, but it’s not what it was when we first attacked.”

Turning to the broader regional landscape, Trump clarified that he is “not demanding” that Lebanon be included in a peace deal with Iran, as Tehran has requested, though he expressed a desire to see “a more surgical” approach to combating Hezbollah

“I’d like to see Lebanon have a better life,” Trump said. “I’d like to see a more surgical attack on Hezbollah. I think it should be more surgical,” he added, but did not reference Israel or its recent military actions against the terror group.