In a speech marking just over a month since the U.S. and Israel launched attacks against Iran, Donald Trump promised that the war is “nearing completion.”
The President’s 19-minute address to the nation from the White House on Wednesday did not reveal anything new and rehashed many of his Administration’s talking points about the conflict. It comes at a time when most Americans disapprove of the war and gas prices have surged as a result of the disruptions in the Middle East.
Trump didn’t give a timeline or exact date for wrapping up the conflict, though he earlier said that it could take some two to three weeks longer. “We are going to finish the job, and we’re going to finish it very fast,” he said Wednesday night. “We’re getting very close.”
He peppered his speech with claims of the U.S.’s “decisive, overwhelming victories” in the war, including wiping out Iran’s Navy and Air Force, diminishing Tehran’s missile capabilities, and killing former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other key Islamic Republic officials. “I’m pleased to say that these core strategic objectives are nearing completion,” he said. “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran. They are decimated, both militarily and economically and in every other way.”
At the same time, Trump seemed to suggest that the war is far from over. “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” he said. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” If no deal is made, he added, referencing ongoing negotiations to end the conflict, “we are going to hit each and every one of their electric-generating plants, very hard and probably simultaneously.” Human rights advocates have decried threats and attacks on Iran’s power infrastructure as it would harm civilians.
Trump also doubled down on his claim that the U.S. was not seeking regime change in Iran but achieved it anyway—though observers say the Iranian regime, while under changing leadership, remains in place. “Regime change was not our goal,” Trump said. “But regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death.”
In response to Americans’ growing concern about increasing gas prices, Trump called the financial impact “short-term” and blamed Iranian attacks on “commercial oil tankers and neighboring countries that have nothing to do with the conflict.” At the same time, he maintained that the U.S. “has never been better prepared economically to confront this threat.” The speech did not assuage markets, however: global oil benchmark Brent crude rose to $105 a barrel, and stock futures fell shortly after.
The U.S. President said that the U.S. “imports almost no oil” from the Strait of Hormuz, the key waterway through which about a fifth of global oil supply passes and that is currently choked off by Iran, and that other nations that have been reluctant to join the conflict but are suffering from the shocks to the energy market ought to either buy oil from the U.S. or “build up some delayed courage” and “go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves.”
“We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on,” he said. “And in any event, when this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally. It will just open up naturally.”
Trump also paid tribute to the 13 U.S. servicemembers who have died in the war, and near the end of his speech, he urged Americans to “keep this conflict in perspective,” enumerating instances of yearslong U.S. involvement in other past wars. Trump had campaigned on ending a pattern of the U.S. getting into “forever wars” and vowed not to start any new ones. But as he made the case Wednesday night that Iran was “the bully of the Middle East,” he also appeared to justify the conflict as in the interests of Americans, claiming: “This is a true investment in your children and your grandchildren’s future.”
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