President Donald Trump has publicly claimed Antony Blinken supported his attacks on Iran but the former secretary of state has denied that happened.
Blinken, who served during former President Joe Biden’s term, scrutinized comments that Trump made during a Republican fundraising dinner Wednesday night.
“I’ve heard that today Blinken made a statement that he should have done it. Thanks a lot Blinken, I appreciate it,” Trump said. “But he came out with the statement that they should have done it, they made a mistake.”
Blinken took to X Thursday, writing Trump “cited me as supporting his attack on Iran and expressing regret we didn’t do it during the Biden Administration. Except I didn’t.”
The former secretary of state then shared a clip of him discussing the U.S.-Iran conflict dating back to the Obama years, which he suggested Trump may be referring to instead. Blinken served as former President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017.
“When the Obama administration came along, we looked very hard at this problem. And we decided that the best way to engage it was through the diplomatic agreement that we ultimately achieved,” Blinken said at an event for the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
He was referring to the so-called Iran Nuclear Deal, which Iran signed in 2015 and Trump withdrew from in 2018.
The deal restricted Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions, but Trump argued during his first term, “the deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and — over time — reach the brink of a nuclear breakout.”
“Of course, we looked at other ways of doing this, including, if necessary, taking military action, but we concluded at the time that if you took military action, the danger was that in the first instance, Iran might respond to that in ways that we’d have to control for,” Blinken said.
“But also, that eventually, we might buy some time, but it would probably rebuild what it had, put it deeper underground in places that we couldn’t get to,” he added.
The Independent has reached out to the White House for clarification on Trump’s comments about Blinken.
More than 1,900 people in Iran have been killed and nearly 1,100 in Lebanon, home to the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, in military strikes that the U.S. and Israel started last month, according to the Associated Press. Thirteen U.S. service members have died.
In an update Wednesday, Admiral Brad Cooper, the leader of U.S. Central Command, said American forces have hit more than 10,000 military targets in Iran.
“We’ve now destroyed 92 percent of the Iranian Navy’s largest vessels,” Cooper said in a video posted to social media. “Iran’s drone and missile launch rates are down by more than 90 percent.”
Despite reports of the U.S. looking to enter a peace deal with Iran, the end of the war is nowhere in sight.
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