President Donald Trump has ominously declared that he faces a “big decision” about his disastrous Iran war.
The Trump administration’s war is now in its seventh month, with no clear timeline for when it might end. But Trump, ahead of a meeting with Gulf leaders, said he has a lot to think about.
“I have a big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them [the Iranian regime] or do I not? It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me,” he told Axios.
Trump is meeting next week with leaders from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman during the UN General Assembly in New York.
On that, Trump said, “I want to find out where they are and how they are doing. We have been very protective of them.”
Trump has previously lashed out at Gulf allies for not doing more to help him in the war he started.
Axios reported that the meeting will likely shape the next phase of the conflict as Trump will either continue with widespread military action or make a renewed pitch for diplomacy.
On the latter front, he has put his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his former golf buddy, Steve Witkoff, in charge of U.S. negotiations with Iran, but those negotiations have repeatedly gone south. Iran has indicated it prefers to negotiate with Vice President JD Vance, who is, at his core, a skeptic of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.
Still, the president seemed pleased about how the war was going, proclaiming to the outlet that “Not one ship has gone to Iran since we started. They tried, and we blew them up.”
Trump’s war with Iran gets more and more disastrous by the day. The cost of the war continues to balloon as the U.S. continues to deplete its stockpiles.
This week, CBS News reported on new photos showing the extent of the damage Iran has inflicted on buildings, aircraft and vehicles at U.S. positions in the Middle East.
The photos, leaked to CBS News by active-duty service members, show a Boeing E-3 Sentry command-and-control plane destroyed by Iranian strikes at Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia in March. That attack injured over 10 service members, two seriously, at the time.
While the war appears to be a catastrophe abroad, on the home front, the Iran war has also caused gas and oil prices to skyrocket.
Trump has dismissed concerns about the high price of gas, especially ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, and has said it is just the price people will have to pay.
“It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done. Remember that. It’s a little more. Frankly, even if it was a lot more,” Trump said at a rally on Wednesday evening, also claiming that soon “ that’s going to come tumbling down. that’s going to be like rocket ships in reverse.”
