President Donald Trump said on March 11 that Iran’s military has been severely degraded by U.S.–Israeli strikes during the conflict that started in late February.
On Wednesday, Iran attacked commercial ships across the Persian Gulf and also Dubai International Airport, escalating a campaign of squeezing the oil-rich region as global energy concerns mounted.
“Our military is the best. It’s the most powerful in the world, and they’re hitting them very hard,” Trump told reporters as he was leaving the White House on Air Force One, adding that “we’re not finished yet.”
When asked by a reporter if the U.S. military needed to take more action, Trump said that there would be “more of the same” and “we’ll see how that all comes out.”
“Right now, they’ve lost their navy. They’ve lost their air force. They have no anti-aircraft apparatus at all,” Trump said. “They have no radar. Their leaders are gone, and we could do a lot worse.”
Trump said that the military is sparing some members of the Iranian leadership and infrastructure, or “they literally would never be able to build that country back again.” He added that the U.S. “could take them out by this afternoon, in fact, within an hour.”
The military has “hit them harder than virtually any country in history has been hit, and we’re not finished yet,” the president continued.