Al-Monitor | Laura Rozen: President Donald Trump Thursday urged Iran to call him, and said the United States and Iran could make a fair deal.

“What I would like to see with Iran, I’d like to see them call me,” Trump told pool reporters on the sidelines of an event in the White House on surprise medical billing.

“What they should be doing is calling me up, sitting down,” Trump said. “We can make a deal, a fair deal.”

Trump’s overture to Iran for talks came amid heightened tensions, four days after Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said the United States was speeding up the movement of a US aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, to the region to deter against an alleged threat that Iran or Iranian-backed proxies could be planning to strike US targets in Iraq. It also followed Iran’s announcement Wednesday that it would suspend some caps on its stockpile of nuclear fuel and heavy water as leverage to try to get benefits from the nuclear deal.

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