Washington: US President Donald Trump said the war against Iran would end “very soon” while maintaining there was more to do and threatening to bomb the country harder if it caused further disruption to global oil supplies, as he tries to calm nerves about surging prices.
Trump said he was disappointed by the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of assassinated supreme leader Ali Khamenei, as Iran’s new leader, predicting it would “lead to more of the same problem”.
He declined to say whether the younger Khamenei now had a target on his back but expressed his preference for an alternative regime insider to take over the country.
The US president also walked back his definitive claim from two days ago that Iran was responsible for a deadly strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed as many as 175 people.
Trump acknowledged the matter was still being investigated but again implied Iran could have been at fault – even as new footage showed a US-made Tomahawk missile hit a nearby naval base at the same time.
“I haven’t seen it,” Trump said of the video. “I just don’t know enough about it … But Tomahawks are used by others. They buy them from us.”
Australian and US sharemarkets rose and the oil price fell after the president made new – although sometimes contradictory – remarks about when the war would end, and flagged that more oil sanctions could be lifted as he battles to keep prices down.
Last week the US temporarily lifted some sanctions on Russian oil, allowing India to purchase product already loaded on tankers for 30 days.
Trump on Monday (US time) said additional sanctions would be lifted on “some countries” and suggested there may be no need to reapply them after the war. “Who knows, maybe we won’t have to put them [back] on, we’ll have so much peace,” he said.
About a fifth of the world’s oil is transported through the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and the Gulf states, and traffic through the strait has effectively been halted by the war. The price of crude briefly rose to $US116 ($164) a barrel before falling under $US90 later on Monday.
At an emergency meeting, G7 finance ministers said they stood ready to tap emergency oil reserves. The 32 member nations of the International Energy Agency collectively hold about 1.2 billion barrels in strategic reserves that can be released if deemed necessary.
Trump has played down the impact on petrol prices as temporary and said that, in the long term, oil prices would benefit from Iran being neutralised as a belligerent force in the region. “I knew oil prices would go up if I did this,” he said. “They’ve gone up probably less than I thought they’d go up.”
The US president has begun referring to the campaign against Iran as an “excursion”, using the term several times during appearances on Monday. He told Republican lawmakers at a conference the excursion would be “short-term”, adding: “We’ve already won in many ways but we haven’t won enough.”
An hour later he told reporters the war would be over soon. Asked whether that meant as soon as this week, he said: “No. But soon. Very soon. Everything they have is gone, including their leadership.”
However, Trump also opened the door to an even harsher bombing campaign if Iran or its supporters further disrupted oil shipments. That included hitting energy infrastructure targets in Iran that were spared thus far.
“I will not allow a terror regime to hold the world hostage and attempt to stop the globe’s oil supply,” he said.
“If Iran does anything to do that they’ll get hit at a much, much harder level. We’ll take them out so quickly they’ll never be able to recover, if they want to play that game … We will hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them, or anybody else helping them, to ever recover that section of the world.”
As Iranian hardliners rallied around their new supreme leader, holding public demonstrations in a show of support, Trump was noncommittal about whether he would ultimately accept their choice. He previously described Mojtaba Khamenei as unacceptable but wouldn’t say whether the new leader had a target on his back.
“I was disappointed because we think it’s just going to lead just to more of the same problem for the country,” Trump said.
He said he preferred someone from inside the regime to become leader because it worked in Venezuela with Delcy Rodriguez – the vice president to Nicolás Maduro who was installed with US support after US forces captured Maduro and brought him to New York to face trial for drug trafficking.
Trump confirmed he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier on Monday, though he did not say if sanctions were discussed. Putin expressed a desire to be “helpful” with the Middle East, the US president said.
“I said you could be more helpful by getting the Ukraine-Russia war over. He wants to be very constructive,” Trump told reporters.
Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov described the conversation as “very substantial” and said it would “likely have practical significance for further work between the two countries”.
Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
