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President Donald Trump answered a burning question from the press on Tuesday during a bilateral press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz: Did Israel drag the United States into war with Iran?
“No, I might have forced their hand,” said President Trump. “You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. If we didn’t do, and we have great negotiators, great people, who do this very successfully…based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen.”
The president added, “I might have forced Israel’s hand.”
Whether the U.S. has been unkindly forced into another Middle Eastern conflict has been the question of the hour following comments from Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday, who explained that Operation Epic Fury – the U.S. military’s large-scale combat operation against Iran – was a preemptive strike.
“The imminent threat was that we knew was that if Iran was attacked, and we believed that they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us,” Rubio told the press.
Rubio also said that the U.S. knew “there was going to be an Israeli action” that would “precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
Rubio’s comments sparked criticism and even anger online among Americans who immediately took this to mean that Israel forced the United States’ hand and dragged the military into the conflict. And as of Monday afternoon, at least six U.S. servicemembers have been killed in action, per RSBN.
The Secretary of State, however, impressed this week that the U.S. felt that these strikes “had to happen no matter what.”
Rubio told reporters, “This operation needed to happen because Iran, in about a year or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it because they could hold the whole world hostage…Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us, and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it — but this had to happen no matter what.”
President Trump said on Tuesday that Iran had been significantly diminished in the few days since the U.S. and Israel launched joint combat operations against the state sponsor of terror.
“They no longer have air protection, they no longer have any detection facilities at all, so they’re going to be in for a lot of hurt – these are bad people,” the president remarked.