Former White House coordinator Brett McGurk predicted that President Donald Trump’s war with Iran will likely intensify after the president gave no timeline for the military operation in his speech Wednesday.
Iran “is a real threat. There are reasons to be doing what we’re doing,” McGurk told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Wednesday night. However, he added, “I thought when he laid out the objectives and the plan, I don’t think we heard too much. And my takeaway was that we might be in for an escalation of this war.”
The president offered no clear path for ending the war Wednesday night after weeks of violence that have left at least 13 U.S. service members dead and hundreds more injured, as well as approximately 1,500 civilians killed, according to human rights monitors.
McGurk, who served four presidents, including Trump in his first term, told Collins he believes “this war is going to continue for some time.”
“If we thought we might hear a deescalatory speech that we’re going to wrap this up in a couple of weeks, I actually heard something quite different,” McGurk said. “He said he visits the families at Dover [Air Force Base], and he said, ‘We must honor them by completing the mission.’ And then he basically threatened Iran that we’re going to prepare to ‘send you back to the Stone Age.’”
Rising oil prices caused by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz have created headaches around the world. However, Trump told reporters securing the waterway is “not for us.”
McGurk told Collins that if Iran continues to control the channel, “they’re going to make hundreds of millions and billions of dollars.”
“If that is the outcome here, strategically, that is not good if our objective is to contain Iran,” McGurk said. “Yeah, he called on our allies to come in and help in the Strait, and we might be willing to help. I heard him say we kind of would lead that mission from behind, hoping that our allies might step up, which I’m not sure they’re going to do.”
“I think the Strait of Hormuz remains a very unresolved issue here. I didn’t really hear an answer,” he added.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to McGurk as a former national security adviser.
