US president Donald Trump has said it is “highly unlikely” that he will order American forces to resume military operations against Iran if Tehran makes tangible progress in negotiations over its nuclear programme and the reopening of the strategic Strait of Hormuz.However, he warned that Washington had identified 38 Iranian bridges that could be destroyed within an hour if further military action became necessary, CNN reported.In a 20-minute telephone interview with CNN, Trump repeated five times that renewed military intervention was unlikely, provided Iran agreed to what he described as a strong agreement.“It depends on whether or not they sign a very strong agreement,” Trump told CNN. “The answer is highly unlikely it’s going to be necessary.”He also claimed that economic sanctions and previous American military strikes had significantly weakened Iran’s capabilities.“They’re a failing nation. It just came out, you saw this year, 301% inflation. Highly unlikely it will be necessary. I would if necessary, but we hit them really hard. I hit them so hard. You don’t know how hard I hit them,” he said.“So it’s highly unlikely I’ll have to. They’re withering away financially. We’ve hit them militarily. We could finish them off,” Trump added.Revealing the extent of potential targets, the US President told CNN: “We have 38 bridges in our site that we can knock down in literally one hour. They’ll all be down.”Explaining why he had not ordered the destruction of the infrastructure, Trump said: “I don’t want to do that because essentially, it’ll take 10 years to rebuild them. I don’t like ripping down bridges. And the hardest thing to build is a bridge. It takes years, and I’m a good builder.”Meanwhile, Tehran has dismissed suggestions that political developments in Washington could influence its position towards the US. Mohamed Mokhber, an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urged the government to focus on domestic economic resilience rather than American electoral outcomes, Al Jazeera reported.“It is naive to tie our fate to Washington,” Mokhber wrote on X. “It is necessary to mobilise our economic resources. Time is a national asset; it must not be wasted.”Separately, Brigadier General Shekarchi, spokesperson for Iran’s Armed Forces, warned Washington against continuing what Tehran describes as hostile policies towards the Islamic Republic. His remarks were carried by Iranian state broadcaster Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).“The political and electoral developments in the United States and the successive defeats of the Trump administration and his party colleagues in various fields are, rather than being the result of superficial fluctuations in the country’s domestic politics, a reflection of a larger and undeniable reality: defeat against the will of a powerful Iran,” he said.Shekarchi also described Washington’s military strategy as ineffective, claiming that its approach had weakened American influence in West Asia.“Any power that lines up against the solid, steadfast rock and the divine and steely will of Islamic Iran will have no end but collapse and disintegration in the world’s public opinion,” he added.