While President Trump’s position on Iran tends to change with little notice, he backed away from his insistence that he doesn’t want war with Iran on Monday, saying now of the war “it could go either way, and I’m OK either way it goes.”
Trump added that it’s “getting harder for me to want to make a deal with Iran” in the first place, because he views them as “behaving very badly,” and are “the number one state of terror in the world.”
Trump followed this up by announcing new sanctions against China, saying they were intended to punish them for “accepting crude oil.” This is likely to be a bigger problem for US-China ties than Iran, as Iran is already heavily sanctioned.
If Trump’s new bellicose stance sticks, this could be a major shift in US hostility toward Iran. President Trump has been one of the few top officials insisting he didn’t want a war as administration hawks continued to talk of a conflict as all but inevitable. If Trump is indeed “OK either way” on the war, it’s not going to be any secret that his top aides will be pushing him to choose war over peace.
Trump: ‘OK’ With a War Against Iran Now
Says he increasingly doesn't want to make a deal
Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.
Join the Discussion!
We welcome thoughtful and respectful comments. Hateful language, illegal content, or attacks against Antiwar.com will be removed.
For more details, please see our Comment Policy.
