President Donald Trump and his team had several red lines that they used to justify the US war against Iran. At a press conference on Wednesday, Trump largely brushed them aside.
Explaining his decision to agree to an interim peace deal, Trump repeated his insistence that the country would never get a nuclear weapon. Yet he went on to suggest that Iran should have the right to enrich uranium, be allowed to develop ballistic missiles and get access to billions of dollars in frozen funds.
Those three things have been at the center of the debate around how to approach Iran for years, dating to the 2015 agreement that the US, under President Barack Obama, and other great powers signed with Iran to limit its nuclear program….
To be sure, he [Trump] has a history of taking a hard stance only to reverse it days — sometimes even hours — later….
But there was plenty in the press conference that surprised even the president’s supporters.
Take Iran’s ballistic missile program…Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US objective was to “destroy the missile threat” posed by Iran.
Trump shrugged off that idea…He even derided those offering him advice — he referred to them as “guys I like” — as focusing on the wrong thing with the fixation on ballistic missiles. “I mean, they have to have some because other people have some,” Trump said.
“Missiles aren’t the problem,” Trump told reporters. “They hurt a little location but they don’t blow up the planet.”
The president took the same approach with nuclear enrichment. For years, he and many Republican critics of Iran have questioned why it should be allowed to enrich uranium if, as it insists, it doesn’t want a nuclear weapon. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News in May that Iran needs to “walk away from enrichment.”
With Rubio standing right behind him on Wednesday, Trump made clear he no longer agreed.
“It’s a little hard when other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you’re not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that,” Trump said. “You have to use a little common sense.”
The third red line Trump crossed centered on Iran’s frozen assets. The country has billions of dollars in overseas accounts that the US has blocked banks from releasing. Part of the justification for years has been that Iran is a leading state sponsor of terrorism, funding proxy groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and can’t be trusted not to do so again.
“It’s not our money, it’s their money — and we froze it at a certain point in time,” Trump said. “I guess we’re going to have to give it back, you know. If we didn’t give it back, nobody would ever invest in the dollar again.”