US President Donald Trump said he will not order a resumption of military strikes on Iran before the November 3 midterm elections.
Trump’s announcement on social media on Thursday came after two US media outlets reported that he was weighing options to strike Iran.
The Atlantic magazine reported that the thinking was Trump would want to maintain the period of relative calm in the war with Iran until after the elections to keep the deeply unpopular war out of the news. The US has not struck the country in recent weeks.
A Pentagon official told Axios that the Department of Defense’s job was to be ready for possible strikes on Iran if the president ordered them.
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Iran war, gas prices, and US midterms: What to know
The US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire agreement in April, but that agreement didn’t hold as both countries resumed fighting in the months that followed.
Trump said at the UN General Assembly that he could yet escalate the war with Iran.
But gas and fuel prices remain high in the US, with many voters already feeling the pressure of high prices for groceries and other goods — factors that have weighed on candidates in Trump’s Republican Party.
Plus, the economy remains one of the top concerns for voters this midterm, when US citizens are going to be electing members of Congress.
In his social media post on Thursday, Trump also said his team has been “having productive discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
That came after Trump, at the end of September, publicly rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — the vital waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil once flowed — to commercial shipping if the US met necessary conditions.
Then Iran last week said it had received a counterproposal.
Pentagon deploys more resources to the Middle East, WSJ reports
Trump’s post also came as the military dispatched more resources to the Middle East, according to a report the Wall Street Journal.
US officials said a third aircraft-carrier strike group, and its thousands of troops, would arrive by the end of November, according to the newspaper.
Edited by: Sean Sinico
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