WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump said Thursday that he does not intend to put ground troops in Iran, undercutting an anonymous report claiming his administration is considering putting thousands of troops in the Middle East.
Trump dispelled the notion that he is considering adding troops to the Middle East during a bilateral meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae in the Oval Office.
“Do you intend to lift sanctions on Iranian oil, and do you intend to potentially put U.S. troops or more troops in the region?” a reporter asked.
“No, I’m not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you, but I’m not putting troops,” the president responded.
His comments come on the heels of an anonymously-sourced Reuters report on Wednesday claiming that Trump is “considering deploying thousands of U.S. troops to reinforce its operation in the Middle East.”
The anonymously-sourced Reuters report added:
Those options include securing safe passage for oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, a mission that would be accomplished primarily through air and naval forces, the sources said. But securing the Strait could also mean deploying U.S. troops to Iran’s shoreline, said four sources, including two U.S. officials.
In his answer on Thursday, Trump also emphasized that the Dow Jones Industrial had hit 50,000 and the S&P 500 had reached 7,000 before the “excursion” in Iran, adding that critics thought both benchmarks for the stock market were unlikely this soon into his term.
“Everything was going great. The economy was great. Oil prices were very low. Gasoline was dropping to I mean, we had $1.99, 1.85; we had great everything,” he said. “And I saw what was happening in Iran, and I said, ‘I hate to make this excursion, but we’re going to have to do it.’”
“And I actually thought the numbers would be worse,” the president added. “I thought that it would go up more than it did, but we’re doing this excursion, and when it’s completed, we’re going to have a much safer world, and the Prime Minister agrees with me on this.”
Trump said he believes “every country agrees” when he says that Iran is a “is a serious threat to the world, to the Middle East, and to the world.”
“So I wanted to put out that fire, and I said, ‘If I do that, oil prices will go up, the economy will go down a little bit.’ I thought it would be worse, much worse, actually,” he added. “I thought there was a chance it could be much worse. It’s not bad, and it’s going to be over with pretty soon.”
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