President Signals Confidence in Iran Talks While Warning Military Action Could Resume if Nuclear Deal Fails
President Donald Trump said U.S. troops will remain stationed in the Middle East until the ongoing American military operation in Iran is fully completed.
“It costs us very little to keep them there. I don’t consider them in danger,” Trump said during an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 7.
“I think we’ll keep them there until such time as we have a completion, and when we have a completion, you will see things as you’ve never seen,” he added. “The oil will go down, the stock market already, as you know, it’s hit an all-time high. Even in the midst of it, it hit all-time highs.”
Approximately 50,000 U.S. troops have been deployed across the region. Since the conflict began on Feb. 28, 13 American service members have been killed, a number Trump described as “too many, but … less than anybody has ever even envisioned.”
At the same time, the president said U.S. military strikes have severely damaged Iran’s leadership structure and chain of command while eliminating the Iranian Navy.
A multi-month ceasefire between the United States and Iran remains in effect as negotiations continue between the two countries, and Trump expressed optimism about the progress of those talks.
“We’re having very good negotiations with the people that are leading the country now,” Trump said. “It’s the third group that we’ve been dealing with, and they are different, and you could say it’s regime change, actually, because these are very different people. I find them to be more rational, very smart.”
Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators that Iranian officials had become willing to discuss elements of their nuclear program. Trump also said during the interview that Iranian officials “conceded the fact that they will not have nuclear weapons.”
The president further indicated that he is open to a joint effort between Iran and the United States to eliminate the regime’s nuclear stockpiles and remove enriched uranium.
“If we make a deal, now we’re friendly, we’ll all go together,” he said. “It’ll be our equipment. We’ll take it out and destroy it, whether it’s on site or whether we take it off-site.”
However, Trump warned that he is prepared to resume military operations against the Islamic regime if negotiations fail to produce an agreement. In that scenario, U.S. forces would destroy Iran’s uranium reserves by military force.
“If we don’t make a deal, then we’re going to take them out militarily, very harshly, and we’ll wait ‘til we do that before we go, in which case we’ll have safety either way.”
Meanwhile, the United States continues to enforce a blockade over the Strait of Hormuz, a key maritime chokepoint through which nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply moved prior to the conflict, in an effort to prevent Iran from exporting oil.
“They’re losing [$400 million] to $500 million a day,” Trump said of Iran during the interview. “It’s not sustainable for them. They have an economy that’s shot, in addition to everything else.”
Despite the ongoing blockade and military operations, Trump declined to describe the conflict with Iran as a war, instead referring to it as a “military exercise.”
