Trump weighs strikes as he gives Iran ‘10 to 15 days’ to agree deal over nuclear programme – US politics live | US news
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Second carrier strike group heads for region as US weighs up early attack
Dan Sabbagh
Experts say there are already sufficient US military assets in the Middle East to begin an aerial bombing campaign against Iran, potentially in conjunction with Israel, though it is less clear what this would achieve.
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and other warships in a strike group have been in the Arabian Sea for nearly a month, with nine squadrons of aircraft including F-35 Lightning IIs and F/A-18 Super Hornets.
A second carrier strike group, led by the USS Gerald R Ford, was last confirmed to be in the Atlantic west of Morocco on Tuesday. It is expected to head through the strait of Gibraltar and towards the eastern Mediterranean, a voyage of several days.
The Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, sailed from the Caribbean Sea, where last month the warship was involved in the seizure of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro from a fortified compound in a night raid.
Together, the carrier strike groups could generate “several hundred strike sorties a day for a few weeks, an intensity greater than during the 12-days war” said Matthew Savill, the director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute.
Even without the Ford, planes flying from the Lincoln could fly 125 or more bombing missions a day, giving the US the means to start attacking government and military sites in Iran in an aerial campaign if Trump chooses to attack.
Aviation experts have tracked a large movement of military planes to the Middle East as the US ramps up pressure on Iran. Six E-3 Sentry Awacs, critical for real-time command and control operations, are now deployed at Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia, having been moved from the US and Japan.
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Trump weighing up an early, limited strike, reports say, after giving Iran two week deadline
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with reports that Donald Trump is considering an early strike to force the Iranians to the negotiating table. An early strike could likely target specific government buildings or military sites and may be limited enough so as not to provoke a full-scale retaliation from Iran, according to the Wall Street Journal.
One unnamed official told the Journal that aides had also discussed large-scale operations, which could involve increasingly larger strikes with an eventual aim of ending the Iranian regime’s nuclear work or the collapse of the government.
The reports come after Trump publicly told Iran that it has “10 to 15 days” to cut a deal over its nuclear program, as the US continues its vast military build up in the region.
“We’re either going to get a deal, or it’s going to be unfortunate for them,” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One yesterday.
He added that negotiations could be allowed to continue for another 10 to 15 days, a deadline the president described as “pretty much” the “maximum”.
“I would think that would be enough time,” Trump said.
The US has kept the option of military action against Iran on the table, as it continues to amass the greatest buildup of forces since the Iraq invasion 23 years ago, Bloomberg reported.
It has moved two aircraft carriers, fighter jets and refueling tankers in the region since the start of the year, giving the US the option of a sustained campaign last several days in co-operation with Israel.
In other developments:
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Donald Trump, who is definitely not mad that his more popular predecessor Barack Obama got a lot of attention for saying last weekend that aliens “are real, but I haven’t seen them”, announced that he is directing the defense department and other agencies to release whatever files they have on the search for alien life.
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Sky Roberts, the brother of the late Virginia Giuffre, told CNN that Trump “is potentially implicated” by the Epstein files, “and he may have to answer some questions”. The US president has denied any wrongdoing and yesterday claimed he was “exonerated” by the Epstein filed.
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The English far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who was repeatedly denied entry to the US in the past, spent Thursday in Washington DC, meeting people close to Trump according to images and video posted on his social media accounts.
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FBI Director Kash Patel has jetted off to Italy to watch the men’s ice hockey medal matches, sticking taxpayers with a bill as high as $75,000, according to multiple reports.
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The husband of Trump’s labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, has reportedly been barred from the labor department’s headquarters in Washington DC after at least two female staff members accused him of sexually assaulting them, the New York Times reports.
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Trump told supporters in Georgia that there had been less media coverage of the cost-of-living crisis in the past weeks “Because I’ve won, I’ve won affordability.”
