There are another two or three weeks of fighting the war in Iran, President Trump said Wednesday in a nationally televised address.
Trump said Iran is “really no longer a threat” after more than a month of combat. Trump also stated that in a short time the U.S. would withdraw from the conflict and leave the still-imperiled Strait of Hormuz in the hands of other countries to “take it” and “cherish it” on their own.
The Hormuz Strait, a key passage for global energy shipment, is currently choked off as Iran threatens to target cargo ships attempting to flow through.
The admission by Trump that the threat is over and that the objectives have been largely met indicates the administration is concluding its mission of attacking Iran for the second time within a year in order to halt the country’s development of nuclear weapons.
Trump and administration officials have spent the past month offering mixed public messages about the end goals of the war, at times suggesting a required “regime change” that would need the president’s approval, or “unconditional surrender,” neither of which has clearly taken place. But as the conflict waged on, polling showed the president’s approval rating in a nosedive, potentially dragging Republicans up for reelection in the midterms down with him.
What Trump didn’t say was how the U.S. might decouple itself from Israel, our ally fighting the same war, and which has time and again pursued its own objectives in ways that appear to contradict the administration’s.
Even so, the president said the U.S. had accomplished “overwhelming victories,” that it had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear development sites and that Iran had been “decimated both militarily and economically.”
“We are going to finish the job, and we are going to finish it very fast.”
