Donald Trump said that Israel is already planning "more brutal" attacks on Iran, and touted the lethality of American weapons, which does not make it sound as though the US was not involved in the overnight strikes, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio had asserted earlier.
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Following Israel’s attack on Iran early Friday morning local time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in an effort to protect Americans in the Middle East from retaliation, was quick to state that the US was not involved.
When he got up, Donald Trump sounded a different note.
He not only touted the American-made weapons that Israel uses, but also said that the US would supply it with a lot more in the future.
Trump, who scrapped a previous Iran nuclear deal during his first term in office, had been trying to negotiate a new agreement with Tehran in recent weeks that was supposed to achieve the very thing that the previous deal had already done, i.e., to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
However, on Friday, the US president indicated that Tehran had not made enough progress on that front.
“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal,” he wrote in a social media post. “I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done.”
In other words, according to Trump, Tehran only has itself to blame for Israel’s attack, which targeted Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility as well as military leaders and the homes of nuclear scientists.
The president added that not reaching a deal would be “much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told,” adding that the US “makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come.”
Trump added that hardliners within Iran’s leadership spoke out against reaching a new agreement with the man who had pulled out of the first one.
“They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!” Trump added. “There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire.”
None of this sounds as though the US was not involved in the attack in any way, which is what Rubio made it sound like.
More importantly, Trump’s rhetoric is unlikely to play well in Tehran and therefore puts Americans in the Middle East at risk of being targeted.
That is the very thing Rubio tried to avoid.
Not the president, who keeps saying whatever pops into his head.
Of course, all of this comes on the heels of an election in which Trump promised that he would not involve the US in foreign laws and that he will make the world a safer place.
The coming days and weeks will show whether that is yet another broken campaign promise… and who will pay the price if it is.
