Photo: Alamy
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States was not yet ready to exit Iran but alluded to a conclusion in the “near future.”
While speaking to reporters in the White House, the president noted, “We’re not ready to leave yet, but we’ll be leaving in the near future…but right now [Iran’s] been decimated, from every standpoint. And again, we’ve had great support from countries in the Middle East, great support, but we’ve had no support from, essentially, no support from NATO.”
This comes after his criticism earlier on Tuesday of NATO countries, who, the president said, have balked at getting involved in Operation Epic Fury.
“I am not surprised by their action, however, because I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one way street — We will protect them, but they will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need,” President Trump remarked in a pointed Truth Social post.
On Tuesday, the president said, “Iran is just a military operation to me. Iran is something that was essentially largely over in two or three days because the Navy was wiped out almost immediately, the Air Force came next, the anti-aircraft came next…we could take out their electric capacity in one hour. There’s nothing they can do right now, because everything is knocked out.”
The president said the U.S. military could shut down Iranian power in “a matter of minutes,” and also threatened to hit the oil industry infrastructure on Kharg Island, if needed. “If you do that, it’ll take them forever to rebuild,” the president remarked. “Meaning, whoever – and hopefully it’s a sane group of people – but whoever it is that’s going to be running that, and we’re gonna try to get people that are gonna run it well, and you know, it’s gonna be a prosperous, wonderful place.”
There does seem to be a level of controlled regime-change going on in Iran, as President Trump has also previously commented that he “has to be involved” in the appointment of Iran’s next political leader, as reported by RSBN.
President Trump on Monday was asked by a reporter if the conflict in Iran could be wrapped up as soon as “this week.”
“Yeah, sure,” the president replied. “I don’t think so, but it’ll be soon, it won’t be long. And we’re going to have a much safer world when it’s wrapped up…I had an obligation to do this. I didn’t want to – I call it an excursion. I didn’t want to make this journey. We had the highest stock market in history, we had low gas prices, everything was good!”
President Trump added that all of those factors were “a very small thing compared to allowing them to have – you want to see the stock market go down? Start letting them hit you with nukes, okay?”