The US president says he thinks he will meet with his Chinese and Russian counterparts, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China’s Shenzhen next week.
– “One of the meetings, I think, will be with President Putin and President Xi. And that’ll be interesting,” he told reporters in West Palm Beach in Florida. “We’ll talk a lot of things, including denuclearisation. But we’ll be talking a lot of things. We’re trying to end the war in Iran, and we’re doing well because, you know, all we have to do, we’re choking it off.”
– Trump said the US Operation Iron Gate, which aims to disrupt Iran’s land supply routes, is now in effect.
– “That means nothing comes in by land. And as you know, the naval blockade, nothing comes in by water,” he said.
– APEC, which was founded in 1989, has 21 members, including Australia, Canada, Japan, China, Russia and the US. Its leaders meet annually.
Trump says he doesn’t ‘think there is any reason’ to escalate war on Iran
The US president addressed the war on Iran in his first sit-down interview since his party’s election defeat with CBS News.
- Trump said voters “didn’t like the war” on Iran and “didn’t like the fact that gasoline went up”. He said that there’s also a “great dislike, incredibly, for Israel”.
- He said he had confidence in his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, saying “we’ve won two wars”.
- He added that he is “not looking to” further escalate the war on Iran, saying “They have nothing. It [the nuclear material] is buried under thousands of tonnes of rock.”
- He insisted that the Strait of Hormuz was “open” with “ships going through”.
- When asked about the cost of US naval escorts in the waterway, he said: “Those countries that we’ve protected are going to pay us back any and all costs that we’ve had for the war ‘cause without us, they wouldn’t exist. Without us, Israel would not exist.”
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