Trump signals early end to war. Behind the scenes, advisers push for exit as midterms loom
Donald Trump's advisers have suggested him to map a path out of the war as the midterms loom and the depleting support to his ‘excursion’.
United States President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 10 March, that he was eyeing an early end to the war with Iran. Emphasising that the conflict with the Iranian regime would not be over this week, he suggested that Operation Epic Fury was running ahead of schedule.
However, even as Trump indicated the war could be short-lived, his advisers have reportedly urged him to map a path to exit, warning that a prolonged campaign could spark political backlash.
Earlier on Monday, 9 March, Trump said that the war against Iran could be short-lived, but he left open the possibility of an escalation in fighting if global oil supplies are disrupted by the Islamic Republic.
“We took a little excursion” to the Middle East “to get rid of some evil. And, I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion,” he said; later posting on Truth Social that if Iran “does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far.”
On the election of a new Supreme Leader, Donald Trump asserted that he was disappointed and said, “We want a system that can lead to many years of peace, and if we can’t have that, we might as well get it over with right now.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, some officials in the Trump administration have said that a US withdrawal from the conflict would be difficult as long as Iran continued launching attacks on countries in the region and Israel maintained its strikes on Iranian targets.
Earlier, too, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said that the strikes on Iran by Israel were the reason America went ahead with sending a barrage of missiles towards Iran. The US believed that if Israel attacked Iran, it would come back as “an attack against American forces.”
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them, before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he said, adding, “We believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow.”
Speaking on Monday, President Donald Trump warned that the United States was ready to keep hitting Iranian positions if Tehran continued to disrupt oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a key global energy route.
A senior administration official also said that Donald Trump would not stop the fighting until he could claim a satisfactory victory.
But people familiar with the matter have said that Trump’s advisers have recently advised him to map out a plan to exit the conflict. They have believed that a longer war, already in its 10th day, would erode the support the US President enjoys. According to a recent poll, as many as 53% of American voters oppose the military action against Iran.
Some Trump advisers have also flagged the midterms approaching and oil prices at record highs.
"When the price of gas and oil rises, so does everything else. Given that affordability was already an issue, this leads to real challenges,” Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser to Trump, was quoted as saying by WSJ.