ANKARA, Turkey — The U.S. plans to bomb Iran again as soon as Wednesday night and could attempt to take Kharg Island, President Donald Trump earlier in the day at the close of the annual NATO leaders’ summit.
Iranian leaders “are behaving very badly, as they have for 47 years, and we hit them hard last night,” Trump said. “I’ll give him a little warning. We’re going to hit them hard tonight, but we’ll see how it all works out.”
Trump said that the U.S. already hit some targets Tuesday on Iran’s Kharg Island, the nation’s primary oil export hub, though Pentagon statements have made no mention of it.
Trump’s remarks — made shortly after he said the ceasefire with Iran was “over” in his eyes — mark the most concrete sign of a full resumption of military operations after getting fed up with roundabout talks.
The Pentagon struck Iranian military sites during the night in response to Tehran’s attacks on ships attempting to move through in the Strait of Hormuz.
His comments were a head-snapping reversal from the president, who only a day prior had indicated Iran’s leaders had become more reasonable before calling them “cuckoo” on Wednesday. Trump hinted the U.S. could wrap up the war without a peace deal because “it’s easier.”
“There’s not a thing they can do about it, but I said, don’t hit the pipes, just hit everything else, and they hit it,” he said, referring to oil pipes in Kharg Island. “They may hit it again tonight.”
Also on the table: resuming a blockade on Iranian ships in the strait, a critical waterway for some 20 percent of the world’s oil.
The president’s bluster comes after Iran launched a series of strikes on commercial ships in the corridor.
Even with his threats to increase attacks, Trump gave the White House’s main Iranian interlocutors — Vice President JD Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — permission to continue peace talks.
“My whole life is deals. I don’t see it, I don’t see it with them,” Trump said. “There may be a big attack and it will knock out a lot of stuff. We don’t knock out nothing, we knock out a lot.”
Trump repeatedly expressed palpable frustration that Tehran had not been negotiating in good faith in talks that have rotated venues between Switzerland and Pakistan since March.
“We’ve made a lot of progress, and they’ll get out of the room,” he said, “We’ll talk about it like we hear, they’ll agree on everything, and then they’ll go and have a news conference and say we never even talked about it.”
Trump expressed confidence that the U.S. economy could handle renewed hostilities with Iran in a later press conference, telling reporters, “if we hit Iran, oil goes up a little bit, it’s alright. You know what we’re doing, we’re de-nukeing it. We’re de-nukeing Iran, they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon.”