President Trump said Thursday he would soon announce whether to launch another round of U.S. strikes on Iran, reviving a threat he had not repeated since Republicans fared poorly in this week's midterm elections.
Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump said he would rather not wreck what remains of Iran but might be forced to, and estimated the country would need 25 years to rebuild from damage already done. On Tuesday evening, while ballots were still being tallied, he had said he had no immediate plans for new strikes.
I would prefer not to destroy what is left of the country, if possible, but I may have to do so. You will know very soon,
Donald Trump, U.S. president
Trump has acknowledged that the vote was, at least in part, a rejection of the war, which began Feb. 28 with joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Diplomacy picked up alongside the threat. A U.S. official confirmed Trump phoned Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, about ending the conflict; the emir's office said he pressed for continued dialogue to head off further escalation. Iran's top diplomat called Gulf counterparts Thursday as several Gulf capitals worried about major new U.S. attacks.
Disputed blasts in Hormuz
Iran's Revolutionary Guard claimed Friday that two more oil tankers struck mines and caught fire in or near the Strait of Hormuz after switching off their navigation systems and taking what it called an unauthorized route. Iranian state media had said a day earlier that five tankers and a tugboat burned in similar incidents.
Maritime officials have not confirmed any of those claims, and Trump has accused Tehran of inventing them to push up energy prices. Separately, a British naval agency said a tanker leaving the strait near Oman reported a waterline explosion Thursday; the crew was safe and the ship kept sailing. Whether that matched any Iranian claim was unclear.
The same agency counted at least 30 attacks on commercial ships in the region in October, a record, despite U.S. assurances the lanes are safe. About a fifth of the world's crude typically moved through the strait before the war, and U.S. naval escorts have helped bring Gulf shipments back near pre-war levels while Washington blockades Iranian ports.
Tehran's allies and rivals
Aliakbar Velayati, foreign affairs adviser to Iran's supreme leader, argued Friday that the war had left Tehran a central shaper of Middle East security and warned that any energy or transit route designed to skirt Iran would prove costly or unstable. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has not appeared publicly since he was wounded in the Feb. 28 strikes that killed his father.
In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin met Iranian security chief Mohsen Rezaei on Thursday. Rezaei said they discussed building pipelines to carry Russian gas to Iran, easing domestic shortages that Tehran says worsened after U.S. and Israeli strikes hit gas refineries.
The Iran-backed Houthis kept up pressure on Saudi Arabia. The Saudi-led coalition said Friday it downed a drone in the Mecca region and two ballistic missiles aimed at Najran, after claiming Thursday it stopped a missile fired toward Medina. The Houthis called the Medina claim false and deny targeting either holy city.
At the pump, GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan expects the U.S. average, $4.06 a gallon on Thursday, to fall under $4 next week for the first time since July. He attributed the recent drop to market bets that the midterm results would push the administration toward a deal to end the war.
