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Iran Would Have Attacked First, Trump Says

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell / @TheElizMitchell

Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell is the White House Correspondent for "The Daily Signal." Send her an email.

President Donald Trump said Iran would have attacked first if the United States didn’t act.

“They were going to attack,” Trump said. “If we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.”

Trump said that feeling was based on the state of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

“We have great negotiators, great people, people that do this very successfully, and have done it all their lives, done it all their lives, very successful,” Trump said. “And based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen.”

The U.S. launched coordinated joint strikes with Israel on Iran, Operation Epic Fury, early Saturday morning. Trump spoke with reporters Tuesday at the White House following a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

When asked by a reporter if Israel forced his hand, Trump said “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

“Israel was ready, and we were ready, and we’ve had a very, very powerful impact, because virtually everything they have has been knocked out,” he said.

On Monday evening, Vice President JD Vance said Trump will not “allow” the United States to be in a “multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective” with Iran.

Vance spoke to Fox News’ Jesse Watters amid concerns from within the MAGA movement that the Iran operation will last a decade or more, like the Iraq war.

“The president has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish. And there’s just no way, I said this before the conflict started, I’ll repeat it again, there’s no way Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective,” Vance said.

“What is different about President Trump, and it’s frankly different about both Republicans and Democrats of the past, is that he’s not going to let his country go to war unless there’s a clearly defined objective,” Vance said.

On Monday, Trump clarified that his objectives in Iran are to destroy the country’s missile capabilities, “annihilate” its navy, prevent the regime from developing nuclear weapons, and stop its arming of terrorist groups around the world.

“He’s defined that objective as Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and has to commit long term to never trying to rebuild their nuclear capability. It’s pretty clear. It’s pretty simple,” Vance said. “And I think that means that we’re not going to get into the problems that we’ve had with Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Vance said regime change is “incidental” to the goal of making sure the Iranians don’t get a nuclear weapon.

“There are a lot of things that could happen with the regime,” Trump said. “Obviously the president and I would prefer that you have a friendly regime in Iran, a stable country, a country that’s willing to work with the United States, as opposed to, you know, bomb our soldiers and try to build a nuclear weapon.”

“But fundamentally, so long as we achieve the president’s objective, to make it clear that Iran can’t build the bomb, I think the president will be happy with the outcome,” Vance said.

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