From his ballroom in Mar-a-Lago, president Donald Trump issued a repudiation to the rolling accusation that his administration has offered no clear guideline as to why the US finds itself at war with Iran – or when it is going to end. If it’s not the end of the beginning of the war, then it’s certainly the beginning of the end, he suggested. Although the war is “almost complete”, nothing is ever over. The Islamic Republic has “no leadership left”, and the president does not approve of their selection as the new supreme leader.
Responsibility for the deaths of the Minab schoolgirls, an estimated 165 of whom were killed at their school by a Tomahawk missile, is still under investigation but, who knows, the blame may lie with the Iranians themselves. The more president Trump spoke, the thicker the haze of the next few days, and weeks, for the Middle East, and the knock-on global effects, became. But! The price of oil cooled and stock markets closed Monday evening in buoyant form.
Once again, Trump, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war and chief enthusiast of the mission, and secretary of state Marco Rubio have started the week by skipping the huddle that might have given them an agreed summary of the bigger picture, or even a hasty sketch. Asked in Mar-a-Lago to indicate which version of events was more accurate – Hegseth’s robust insistence on Saturday that things were just starting or Trump’s own assurances to CBS on Monday afternoon that, actually, it was “very complete” – the president turned enigmatic.
“I think you could say both,” he began.
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“It’s the beginning of building a new country. But they [Iran] have no navy, they have no air force, they have no anti-aircraft equipment. It has all been blown up. They have no radar. They have no telecommunications – and they have no leadership. It’s all gone. We could call it a tremendous success right now. Or we could go further. And we’re going to go further. The big risk on that war has been over for three days. We wiped them out on the first two days. When you think about it, it’s incredible. We wiped out a big navy. A very powerful navy. These were serious ships that you buy when you want to win battles – they are all on the bottom floor. The sailors are all running off the ships. The drones are down to 25 per cent.”
On Monday evening, it was reported that the White House is considering what would be a high-risk military special operation to physically remove the Iranian store of enriched uranium located deep in the tunnels of the Isfahan site. Although that site was structurally obliterated by the joint US-Israeli air raid last year, the stockpile reportedly remains intact, and potentially retrievable if left there.
As recently as Saturday, Trump suggested that obtaining the gas canisters would be “something we could do later on. We wouldn’t do it now.” But on Monday, he outlined what he sees as the bottom-line condition for calling an end – and a victory in a war in which the US allies, Israel, continue to push for regime change.
“Where they are not going to be starting the following day to develop a nuclear weapon. When I can see that they will no longer have capacity for a very long period of time of developing weaponry that can be used against the United States, Israel or any of our allies.”
That imperative suggests a need for the US to remove the material from Isfahan, a precise and unprecedented operation that, military experts have suggested, would necessitate considerable backup military presence in the region. An operation of that ambition and risk would extend the military campaign for an unforeseen period, prolonging the acute global energy crisis that has sent tremors through international economies and markets.
The American Automobile Association reported on Monday that the national price of unleaded had reached $3.47 (€2.98) per gallon at US pumps – and was trading at $5.20 in California. The price per gallon has jumped by 50 cents in the week since the bombing of Iran began, and was threatening to climb towards historic highs of more than four dollars in 2008 or even the five-dollar high of the summer of 2022. Before 2021, US gas-per-gallon exceeded $3 only three times in history. The optics in overseeing a spike in the national price to $4 or more is not something the Republican Party would wish to carry into a midterm election season in which the domestic economy remains the burning issue.
“They went artificially up because of this excursion into a very positive thing,” Trump said, sounding sanguine about the spiralling prices.
“I knew oil prices would go up if we did this and they went up probably less than I thought they would. This went very quickly. We talked about that with president Putin. He was very impressed with what he saw because nobody’s ever seen anything quite like it. “
Trump’s midafternoon interview with CBS had the instant effect of cooling the crude oil price as it dropped from $110 per barrel to $90 per barrel. It remains to be seen what his more in-depth remarks on a war he repeatedly referred to as an “excursion” has in the coming days.
Meanwhile, 26-year-old Kentuckian Benjamin Pennington, an army sergeant, became the seventh US military member to die on duty in the conflict. Vice-president JD Vance and war secretary Hegseth attended the solemn transfer when his remains arrived at Dover Airbase in Delaware on Monday evening.
In Tehran, the bombing continued. Kamal Kharazi, foreign policy adviser to the office of the supreme leader, said in an interview with CNN that “economic pressure” felt by other countries would cause the US and Israel to end their campaign. In Washington, a number of US Democratic senators have called for a full and impartial review into the deaths of the schoolchildren in Minab, which, the statement read, would “if true make it one of the worst cases of civilian casualty in decades of American military action in the Middle East”.
In keeping with the theme of his remarks on Monday, the president was ambivalent about the possible findings of that report, whenever it is completed.
“Iran has some Tomahawks,” he said. “They used to have more. But whether it’s Iran or somebody else, the fact that it’s a Tomahawk – a Tomahawk is very generic, it’s sold to other countries. But that’s something that’s been investigated right now. I just don’t know enough about it. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks – they buy them from us. But certainly, whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”
