Two months before he is due to leave office, President
Donald Trump asked top aides about the possibility of striking
Iran’s nuclear facilities, The New York Times reported
Monday.
During a meeting at the Oval Office last Thursday, the outgoing
Republican leader asked several top aides, including Vice President
Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, “whether he had options to take
action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks,” the
newspaper said.
The senior officials “dissuaded the president from moving ahead
with a military strike,” warning him that such an attack could
escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks of his
presidency, the Times wrote.
Trump reportedly asked the question after a report by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that Iran was
continuing to stockpile uranium.
According to the Times, the most likely target of such a strike
would have been Natanz, where the IAEA reported that Tehran’s
“uranium stockpile was now 12 times larger than permitted under
the nuclear accord that Mr Trump abandoned in 2018,”
three years after it was signed in a bid to curb Iran’s nuclear
capabilities.
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Iran has long been Trump’s bete noire, and he first reintroduced
sanctions and then tightened them even further after scrapping the
nuclear accord.
European partners in the accord have struggled to keep the deal
afloat despite Trump’s efforts to torpedo it, and are hoping for a
renewed diplomatic approach after the election victory of Democrat
Joe Biden on November 3, although Trump refuses to concede his
loss.
The Trump administration has pledged to step up the punitive
measures, which some critics see as an attempt to build up a “wall
of sanctions” that Biden would have difficulty tearing down once he
takes office.
-AFP