Trump edges closer to blaming Iran for Saudi oil attack
President Donald Trump on Monday said that “certainly it would look” as though Iran was behind a series of drone attacks in Saudia Arabia that struck the heart of its oil production, the closest he’s gotten yet to placing outright blame on Tehran for the strikes.
“Well, it’s looking that way,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office while meeting with Bahrain’s crown prince. “We'll have some pretty good — we'll have very strong studies done but it is looking that way at this moment and we'll let you know as soon as we find out definitively, we'll let you know but it does look that way.“
Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have taken credit for the Saturday drone strike at the kingdom’s Abqaiq plant and its Khurais oil field, which disrupted an estimated 5.7 million barrels of the kingdom's crude oil production per day. Tehran has denied responsibility for the attack.
Trump reacted to the attack with furor over the weekend, tweeting Sunday that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” but would wait to discuss a response with the Saudis once they had a better idea of who was behind the attacks.
While the president has still not personally named Iran as the culprit of the attacks, he inched closer to doing so throughout the day on Monday, teasing that “you'll find out at the right time” who the U.S. believes is responsible but that “it is too early to tell you that now.”
“You're going to find out in great detail in the near future. We have the exact location of just about everything,” he said.
Other members of his administration have been more explicit, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
"Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia while Rouhani and Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy. Amid all the calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply. There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen," Pompeo wrote on Twitter on Saturday, referring to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Pompeo issued a call for “all nations to publicly and unequivocally condemn Iran’s attacks” and vowed that Iran would be “held accountable for its aggression.”
Zarif, in turn, mocked Pompeo in a tweet, writing that “Having failed at max pressure, Pompeo's turning to max deceit," a reference to the Trump administration’s characterization of its Iran policy.
At the White House on Monday, Trump downplayed any daylight between himself and his top diplomat as he juggled the first international crisis since the abrupt exit of his former national security adviser — and notorious Iran hawk — John Bolton.
“I think we’re the same,” Trump told reporters when asked why Pompeo had been more unequivocal than he was in blaming Iran. “I think we just want to find out the final numbers and see — you look at a vector, you look at — there are lots of different things we can look at, David. And we‘ll know for certain over the next pretty short period of time.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he’d been in touch with allies in the region, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman and Iraqi Defense Minister Najah al-Shammari, about the strikes. In a series of tweets Monday afternoon, Esper said he’d just returned to the Pentagon after briefing Trump on the situation, adding that multiple U.S. agencies were working together to address what he called an “unprecedented attack and defend the international rules-based order that is being undermined by Iran.”
The attack comes as tensions in the regions have simmered for months as Iran continues to take steps toward breaching the 2015 nuclear deal while under crushing sanctions from the U.S. It also comes amid dashed hopes of a potential meeting between Trump and Rouhani at the U.N. General Assembly later this week.
Both leaders took steps back from even the possibility of a face-to-face meeting. According to state-run news outlet Fars, Iran’s foreign minister said Monday that “neither is such a plan on our agenda nor will such a thing happen,” despite Rouhani’s earlier suggestions that a meeting could be arranged if the U.S. let up on its sanctions.
Trump also reversed himself over the weekend, blasting the media for correctly reporting that he and Pompeo had said at least in the last week he’d be willing to meet with Rouhani with no preconditions.
Officials in Washington and Tehran have frequently offered conflicting accounts of a number of clashes in the Persian Gulf, including over Iran's downing of a U.S. drone and of a series of explosions on foreign tankers earlier in the summer that the U.S. similarly pointed the finger at Iran for.
Monday morning, Trump had pointed to prior controversies that he said cast doubt on Iran's denials.
“Remember when Iran shot down a drone, saying knowingly that it was in their 'airspace' when, in fact, it was nowhere close,” he asked in a tweet, referring to Iran’s downing of an unmanned U.S. aircraft three months ago.
“They stuck strongly to that story knowing that it was a very big lie. Now they say that they had nothing to do with the attack on Saudi Arabia,” he continued, adding: “We’ll see?”
After Saturday's attacks, U.S. officials released satellite photos of the damage, which they say indicate the attackers approached from the north, where Iran and Iraq are located relative to Saudi Arabia, rather than the south, where Houthi rebels in are based in Yemen, according to The Associated Press.
The Saudis on Monday warned that they had not come to a final conclusion about who was behind the attacks, though a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen strongly suggested that Iran was likely responsible.
At a news conference in Riyadh, Colonel Turki al-Malki told reporters that preliminary results of the investigation showed the attack did not originate in Yemen and involved Iranian weapons.
At the White House, Trump announced that Pompeo “and others” would travel to Saudia Arabia in the near future “to discuss what they feel” and would “make a statement fairly soon.”
He added: “they also know something that most people don't know as to where it came from, who did it, and we'll be able to find that out and figure that out very quickly. We pretty much already know.”
Still, Trump repeatedly insisted that he was not looking to go to war with Iran, though he did tell reporters that “sometimes you have to” engage in military conflict and that the U.S. is “more prepared than any country … in any history if we have to go that way.”
“I will tell you that was a very large attack and it could be met with an attack many, many times larger, very easily by our country. But we're going to find out who definitively did it first,” he said, explaining that he would consult with the remaining signatories of the faltering 2015 nuclear deal.
He also reiterated that he would defer to Saudi Arabia when concocting a response to the strikes, a stance that’s made some in the national security crowd bristle. But he swatted away a reporter’s query about whether diplomacy with Iran had been exhausted, declaring that is “never” the case.
The interruption of the equivalent of more than 5 percent of the world’s daily oil supply have caused oil prices to surge, and Trump said he’d authorized the release of U.S. strategic petroleum reserves in a “to-be-determined amount” to stabilize oil markets if necessary, but sought to ease concerns of any shortage. The attacks forced Saudi Arabia to slash its production in half, however, and it’s unclear how long the facilities targeted will remain down.
White House officials continued to exude an air of confidence that the U.S. oil boom would provide insulation from any shocks to the market stemming from the strikes. Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, told reporters Monday that that was what Trump meant in his “locked and loaded” tweet.
“I think that 'locked and loaded' is a broad term and talks about the realities that we’re all far safer and more secure domestically from energy independence," he said.
“This is not the 1970s oil embargo. It’s not 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait,” he continued. “We’re now a net oil exporter which means that the American market is much better protected.”
Trump echoed that, telling reporters that the disruption in the Persian Gulf “won’t affect us, and ultimately I don’t think it’ll affect the world, either.”
“If you look at what we have, we have tremendous amounts of oil in our country,” he said.
Short and Trump’s assurances appeared to do little to soothe nerves: Futures for brent crude oil, the global benchmark, surged 14.6 percent to $69.02 a barrel by the end of the day — the largest one-day percentage gain in three decades, according to Retuers. At one point, prices rose nearly 20 percent, the biggest intra-day gain since the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. Analysts pinned the blame on Trump’s threat.
Still, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Monday that he’d like to see international energy producers band together in light of the threat from Iran.
“It is a time for a coalition of tame and thoughtful energy producing and energy consuming countries to come together and put a stop to Iran’s malign activity,” he said in an interview on CNBC.
He expressed confidence that such a group would come together, adding that “it’s time for us to be globally spending a message that Iran cannot be allowed to act in the way they are acting. They are attacking oil supplies to try to disrupt the global economy.”
Trump allies in Congress were split over how the president should counter the strikes. Over the weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham, an Iran hardliner, said that Trump needed to put striking Iranian oil refineries on the table as possible retaliation.
The president appeared to take note of that idea, telling reporters he would consider that to be a proportionate response to the strikes.
But Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called for a forceful yet restrained response, arguing that barging into a military conflict with Iran could involve numerous other countries and would be hard to de-escalate.
“#Iran has spent 10 years building capacity to do exactly what they did on Saturday in #SaudiArabia. Inflict damage on adversary but have a 3rd party proxy group either conduct attack or claim credit for it,” he said in a slew of tweets, adding that Iran’s goal “is to punish rivals while avoiding international condemnation.”
Rubio suggested that the U.S. needed to first lay out its evidence implicating Iran at the U.N. General Assembly before making sure that any future nuclear deal with Iran addresses its sponsorship of terror and its possession of rockets. Still, he argued, while the U.S. needed to maintain diplomacy as the core of its Iran strategy, Trump needs to assert his right to punish those responsible for the attacks and eliminate the capacity to carry out future attacks while keeping defense assurances to allies in the region.
Failure to address Iran now, he argued, means that Tehran “will attain irreversible leverage over the entire region” in a matter of years.
Trump, asked in the Oval Office whether Saudi Arabia’s defense was their own responsibility, noted that he hadn’t promised them anything in regard to coming to their defense.
“The Saudis want very much for us to protect them,” he said. “That was an attack on Saudi Arabia. And that wasn't an attack on us. But we would certainly help them.”
CORRECTION: The title for the video appearing with this story incorrectly identified the person with President Donald Trump as Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. He is actually the Crown Prince of Bahrain.
