Fox News Analyst Says Trump Is Falling Into An Obama-Style Iran Trap | EUROtoday

Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume this week mentioned President Donald Trump could also be poised to repeat one among former President Barack Obama’s errors with regard to the prospect of U.S. army motion in Iran.

Appearing on Fox News’ “Special Report” Monday, Hume instructed Trump was “in a predicament” after clashes between Iranian officers and anti-government demonstrators have turn out to be more and more lethal.

“He told the Iranian authorities not to attack the people when they were protesting,” he defined. “Then they carried out this hideous slaughter, this hideous slaughter that killed tens of thousands of people, just ghastly … and he’d warned them not to do it.”

He went on to notice: “So he’s in a situation where he needs to do something. And the idea that there’ll be some kind of nuclear negotiation now with a country that has proven itself time and time again untrustworthy in such negotiations seems to me that will leave him with a lot of people thinking he came up short.”

Protests erupted across Iran in late December, with many demonstrators resentful of high inflation, severe economic distress and political repression.

Authorities, led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, responded with mass arrests and, later, a series of massacres on civilians. Specifics of those attacks are relatively scarce, given that they were carried out during a near-total internet shutdown. Last week, Time reported that the death toll from attacks that occurred Jan. 8 and 9 fell around 30,000, while other outlets have put that figure at closer to 36,500.

Last month, Trump pledged U.S. military action in Iran if attacks on protesters were carried out. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Khamenei has subsequently blamed Trump for the massacres, deeming the U.S. president a “criminal” for having “openly encouraged” protesters to stand up towards their authorities by promising them “military support.”

Elsewhere in Monday’s “Special Report” phase, Hume was proven a clip of Obama’s 2012 “red line” second, when he threatened Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with worldwide motion if Syria’s authorities used chemical weapons. Though Assad’s regime crossed that line the next yr, Obama didn’t observe by on that risk.

“A pillar of our defense strategy is now and has long been the establishment and maintaining a deterrent,” Hume mentioned, in response to the Obama clip. “People looking at you and saying, ‘We don’t want to mess with them because they have force, they have a lot of it, and they’re willing to use it.’ And when you threaten to use it, and then when something happens that you’ve warned against, and you don’t use it…”

Trump, nonetheless, “has shown himself willing to do things in the past,” he added, pointing to latest actions in Israel and Venezuela. “So the president has some standing to protect here, and he earned it and deserves to have it.”