NBC News:

By Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Abigail Williams and Dan De Luce

Top Trump administration officials do not yet have clear guidance on what President Donald Trump would hope to accomplish with military action in Iran as U.S. and Iranian officials met indirectly Friday to try to avoid a war, according to two U.S. officials.

While Trump has left open the possibility of pursuing regime change in Iran, the two U.S. officials said he has not yet settled on precisely what his objectives for any possible military action would be. They also said there is no clear road map or consensus within the administration over what role the U.S. would play after any such operation.

Asked Wednesday in an interview with NBC News whether Iran’s supreme leader should be worried, Trump said: “I would say he should be very worried, yeah. He should be.”

Trump told NBC News’ Tom Llamas that he learned Iran may be trying to reconstitute its nuclear program after the U.S. military “wiped out” three of its nuclear sites in June.

“They were thinking about starting a new site in a different part of the country,” Trump said. “We found out about it. I said, ‘You do that, we’re gonna do very bad things to you.’”

Trump has not publicly outlined his precise goal in Iran, including whether he is seeking to topple the clerical regime, weaken it or force it to accept restrictions on its nuclear and missile programs.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that negotiations between U.S. and Iranian officials, which were held indirectly early Friday in Oman, must include curtailing not only Iran’s nuclear program but also the range of its ballistic missiles, as well as its support for proxies in the region and “the treatment of their own people.”

“I’m not sure you can reach a deal with these guys, but we’re going to try to find out,” Rubio told reporters. “We don’t see there’s any harm in trying to figure out there’s something that can be done. This is a president that always prefers a peaceful outcome to any conflict or any challenge the time for one.”

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