Trump says Iran war ‘is very complete’ and teases a quicker ending than his original four-week timeline
President Donald Trump on Monday said the joint U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran could wrap sooner than expected as global markets have continued to tumble from the effects of rising oil prices as a result of the week-old war.
In an interview, Trump told CBS News he thought the war is “very complete, pretty much.”
“They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no Air Force,” he said.
Trump also told the television network that the U.S. war effort is now “very far” ahead of the four to five week timeline he and his advisers had estimated when the air campaign began just over one week earlier.
The president’s latest comments come just hours after Pentagon officials released the identity of Sergeant Benjamin Pennington, who they said was the seventh American service member to die from enemy fire since American warplanes began bombing Iran early on March 1.
Pennington, who enlisted in the Army in 2017, died from injuries sustained during an attack on U.S. troops at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia.
While the American death toll from the airstrikes has remained in the single digits, the war’s effect on the petroleum market has caused gasoline prices in the United States to soar by double-digit percentages since the war’s start last week.
According to the American Automobile Association, the average cost of a gallon of gasoline hit $3.48 on Monday, with prices hitting even higher levels in places like California, where the price of a single gallon is $5.20.
Gasoline costs are closely tied to oil prices and the latest explosion of violence in the Middle East has badly disrupted the flow of crude oil from the Persian Gulf, sending oil soaring beyond the $100 per barrel mark for the first time since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022.
Iranian threats against tankers intending to cross the key Mid East shipping route Strait of Hormuz has led to their idling in port rather than risk being attacked. As a result, shipments are going undelivered and the world faces being cut off from around one-fifth of its supply.
Iraq, the U.A.E. and Kuwait have responded to the impasse by making precautionary cuts to their domestic oil production in anticipation of forthcoming storage issues if their exports remain grounded, according to CNBC.
But Trump has so far attempted to downplay the problem in a Sunday night Truth Social lost in which he wrote that “short-term” spikes in oil are “a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace.”
He added that anyone who believes otherwise is a “fool.”
