Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” but to accept a U.S.-negotiated Iran cease-fire because President Donald Trump told the Financial Times that he calls “all the shots.”
In an interview shortly after Iran fired several missile barrages toward Israel for the first time since a cease-fire was negotiated in April, Trump also told Fox News that he would instruct Netanyahu to refrain from retaliating against Iran, contradicting Israeli military statements.
Trump told the Financial Times that Iran’s missile barrage had not changed his goal of reaching a U.S.-Iran interim cease-fire agreement: “It’s not going to have any impact on the deal,” adding, “The deal may make it on its own merit, or not, but this will not have any effect on it.”
“We’ll see how it ends up. But they [the missile strikes on Israel] were attacks that did not kick at all. It’s one of those things that’s been going for 3,000 years, or 47 years, depending on how you count.”
“I think the deal is going on,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”
Asked what would happen if cease-fire negotiations failed, Trump said he would consider deploying troops for a U.S. ground operation in Iran.
“It means [one of] two things,” he told FT. “Number one, it would mean that possibly we would go in and take care of the rest of the place that we didn’t take care of militarily. Or it would just mean that we would keep the blockade on Iran because the blockade has been probably more powerful than any attack that was ever made on that country.”