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Pompeo Says Trump ‘Does Not Want War’ With Iran

Pompeo Says Trump ‘Does Not Want War’ With Iran

Mike_Pompeo | Circa February 2012 | By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Mike Pompeo) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Audrey Conklin
June 18, 2019 4:55 PM ET

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said President Donald Trump “does not want war” with Iran while speaking at the U.S. Central Command in Florida Tuesday.

“President Trump does not war,” Pompeo said in his remarks, “and we will continue to communicate that message while doing the things that are necessary to protect American interests in the region.”

“It’s been our mission since the beginning of this administration to convince the Iranian regime not to move forward with their nuclear program and not to continue to engage in development of their missiles and the all the other malign activities they’ve been engaged in around the world. That’s why we put in place the pressure campaign,” the secretary of state said.

Pompeo continued that while the campaign has been successful, Americans should remember that Iran has posed a consistent nuclear threat for “40 years,” even after Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry signed the Iran Nuclear Deal, and “to reestablish deterrence is a challenge but one I know the Trump administration is up to.”

After pulling out of the Obama-era Iran Nuclear Deal, Trump designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization in April to escalate the United States’ pressure campaign against Iran. The president said his administration would “continue to increase financial pressure and raise the costs on the Iranian regime for its support of terrorist activity until it abandons its malign and outlaw behavior.”

On Monday, however, the U.S. military released footage that they claim shows Iran removing an unexploded mine from an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman. A second tanker was also attacked, resulting in a 4% increase on oil prices. 

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on the same day of the attack that “America could not do anything” to stop Iran from creating nuclear weapons before his country was blamed for the strike. Tehran, however, has denied allegations and pinned responsibility for the destruction of the tankers on an enemy country in an attempt to ruin Iran’s relationships with the U.S. and its allies.

Trump responded to the attacks that he called “very minor” by saying he would leave the question of military action against the regime to stop Tehran from getting a nuclear bomb open: I would certainly go over nuclear weapons and I would keep [military action] a question mark.”

Some big names in the media and several presidential candidates have interpreted his remarks as provoking a potential war with Iran:

Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan announced Tuesday that the U.S. is preparing to deploy 1,000 troops to the Middle East for defensive purposes in response to growing concerns for the United States’ relationship with Iran.

Pompeo pointed out that these strikes on vessels are not the only attacks suspected to have been conducted by Iran.  Since the beginning of May, he said, there have been over a half-dozen instances of Iranian attacks — “some thwarted and some not successfully thwarted,” including the two attacks on U.S. ships last week.

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