Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York said Americans are seeing a repeat performance from President Donald Trump’s negotiations with Iran.
“We have seen this show before,” York said on Fox News’s America Reports Thursday.
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“He always does a caution like, ’Maybe it won’t happen. I can’t be sure, but it’s coming soon,’ and he’s said that over and over and over again. And I think a lot of critics of the president have thought that it has given the Iranians the impression that the president does not really want to go through with these attacks and he’s looking for an excuse not to do it.”
On Monday, an Apache helicopter was shot down near the Strait of Hormuz, and two Americans were rescued. York argued that the incident raised the stakes for the United States.
“It was the Apache attack that really, I think, sent this to another level and made it impossible to keep what Trump has been calling a ‘ceasefire’ going on,” York said.
After the attack, the U.S. responded with retaliatory strikes against the Iranian air defense.
U.S. Central Command announced Thursday that the Strait of Hormuz remains open for transit and emphasized that Iran does not control the strait.
York said if the U.S. is controlling the strait, “I think the Iranian house of cards falls apart, [because] their power is their power over the Strait.”
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“A lot of the last two or three months has been involved in this kind of useless struggle to get back to where we were before the war started,” York said.
York maintained that U.S. control over the strait will allow the president to focus on the original goal of the war, which is ensuring that Iran does not obtain any nuclear weapons.
