Trump says US has ‘won’ Iran war, but ‘I want to win by a bigger margin’
President Trump said Thursday that he is not satisfied with the current standing between the U.S. and Iran, amid stalled nuclear deal negotiations between the two countries.
“We’ve already won, but I want to win by a bigger margin,” Trump told Newsmax’s Greta Van Susteren.
“We’ve destroyed everything. If we leave right now, it will take them 20 years to rebuild, if they ever could rebuild, but it’s actually not good enough,” the president said. “We have to have guarantees they will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Trump also warned that Iran would “use the nuclear weapon if they had it.”
“I know people,” the president told Van Susteren. “They will use the nuclear weapon, and we’re not going to give them a chance to do it.”
The U.S. and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran on Feb. 28, killing its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top officials. The U.S. is attempting to broker a new nuclear deal with Iran, after Trump exited a preexisting agreement with the country during his first administration.
On Wednesday, the president rejected a new proposal from Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the U.S. lifting its naval blockade on Iranian ports and vessels in the waterway.
The effective closure of the strait, a major oil trading corridor, has placed an immense strain on global energy supplies and sent fuel costs skyrocketing.
Global oil prices briefly hit a four-year high early Thursday morning. The price of international benchmark Brent crude oil surged to $126 per barrel — the highest level since 2022 — before dropping back down to around $111 a barrel later that morning.
On Friday morning, Brent was trading just under $108 a barrel.
Fuel costs have also increased across the U.S. as a result of this global energy shortage. The average price of standard gas Friday morning was sitting at $4.39 a gallon, according to AAA .
The Trump administration has brushed aside these rising costs, labeling them as “short-term” pains in order to reach a long-term peace deal.
At times, White House officials have even disagreed with one another about the economic impacts of the war.
After Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNN that gas prices might not fall below $3 a gallon until next year, Trump told The Hill in a phone call that Wright’s assessment was “totally wrong.”
In a statement provided to The Hill last week, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers maintained that the energy cost increases are temporary.
“President Trump brought oil and gas prices down to multi-year lows at record speed, and as traffic in the Strait of Hormuz normalizes, these energy prices will plummet once again,” Rogers said. “The President was always clear that these were short-term, temporary disruptions that would be resolved through the unprecedented successes of Operation Epic Fury and ongoing peace talks.”
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