President Donald Trump offered a frantic justification for his disastrous war with Iran during an interview with a conservative talk show host.
The president’s two-week ceasefire with Iran is scheduled to end Wednesday, leading to widespread uncertainty about what comes next in the war.
Over the past few days, the president has given mixed messages on the war as he alternates between claiming total victory in Iran while also threatening “complete decimation” if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands.
During an interview Monday with The John Fredericks Show, the president insisted the chaos was unavoidable.
“We had no choice in Iran,” he said. “It wasn’t like we had a choice. We had to do it.”
The president didn’t say why exactly his hands were tied, though earlier in the interview he warned that if he hadn’t attacked Iran, the regime would have launched nuclear weapons against the U.S.
“You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he said. “They’ll use it here. They’ll knock out Israel in the Middle East, and they’ll come to Europe and they’ll come here, because they are ill. Very ill.”
The attempted justification came as the war has stretched well beyond the president’s initial timeline, driving up gas prices and fueling inflation.
The president has repeatedly accused Iran of being weeks way from developing a nuclear weapon when he attacked the country on Feb. 28, a claim that both nuclear experts and U.S. intelligence assessments dispute.
Intelligence assessments have also contradicted Trump’s claim that Iran was developing long-range missiles that could reach U.S. soil.
Vice President JD Vance is expected to leave for Pakistan on Tuesday for a new round of peace talks, but Iran has not publicly confirmed whether it will attend in light of Trump’s repeated threats against the country’s infrastructure.
Iranian negotiators have also refused to come to the table so long as the U.S. continues its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow shipping lane that has been a bottleneck for global oil supplies since the war began on Feb. 28.
Privately, however, Iranian officials have said that Iran’s lead negotiator would attend the talks if Vance is there, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
Many sticking points remain, however, including Iran’s nuclear program.
Earlier this month, Vance joined Trump’s special envoys to the Middle East, real estate developer Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, for a marathon 21-hour meeting with their Iranian counterparts in Islamabad, Pakistan.
The talks ended with an impasse over Iran’s nuclear program, with Vance accusing Iran of refusing to rule out a nuclear weapon, and Iran saying it had the right to enrich uranium for its civilian energy program.
The country has a stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent that could be used for several nuclear weapons if enriched further to 90 percent.
That percentage is already well above the threshold used in civilian nuclear power plants and research reactors, but nuclear experts say the 60 percent enrichment was meant to send a political message of deterrence, Scientific American reported in March.
Iran has offered to dilute its enriched uranium to a lower percentage, but the U.S. negotiators apparently didn’t take the proposal seriously, CNN reported earlier this month. That suggests the U.S. team doesn’t under the technical details of the proposal, sources told the outlet.
Trump insisted on Monday that regardless of the status of the proposed peace talks, the U.S. has already won the war.
“I did it in two months what they couldn’t do in 12 years, 13 years, 15 years between Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq,” he bragged to The John Fredericks Show. “We’ve wiped out their whole military apparatus, and we will get it done because I always get things done.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
