‘So Damaging!’ Kinzinger Hammers Trump For Being ‘Eager’ to Back Down On Iran Threats

CNN anchors Brianna Keilar and Boris Sanches spoke to former GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) on Monday following President Donald Trump announcing on social media that he had canceled a planned attack on Iran meant to happen tomorrow.

Keilar introduced Kinzinger and asked, “The president has this habit of making these threats about essentially—not even essentially—about destroying Iran and then not following through on them. There are obviously questions about whether he should have made the threats in the first place, but I wonder what your reaction is to him again finding an off-ramp from his threat?”

“Yeah, that’s the whole thing. This is so damaging, you know. Regardless of—let’s just be, you know, agnostic on whether he should attack again or not for the moment—when you make threats and then you’re eager to back down from those threats, which he has been every single time,” Kinzinger replied, adding:

I mean, he’s gone from “we will destroy an entire civilization” to “we have a deal,” which we never actually had, by the way. Claiming the Strait’s open, claiming it’s closed, claiming he was gonna pull the trigger on May 19th, and now everybody wants him to deal because we’re about to, like, lose all of your strategic strength.

One of the greatest things the United States had is our ability to say we will do something. The enemy knows that. And then hopefully we won’t have to do that. This has just been like: threat, back off, threat, back off. And I haven’t seen the Iranians move in any way here. And we find ourselves in the worst-case scenario, which is a closed strait, this nebulous future. And gas is now having to price in, and futures are pricing in the uncertainty.

“I wonder if you think that there is a path for the U.S. to somehow exit this situation in a better position than it went in. Is the only way out of this essentially to have this new Persian Gulf Strait Authority that Iran has installed in the Strait of Hormuz intact and to essentially find some form of concession that Iran will accept in order to reopen the strait to their liking?” followed up Sanchez.

“Yeah, I mean, that’s what’s crazy. We did go in with overwhelming military power, and now in the White House, they’re trying to figure out what Iran needs to be satiated, to be pleased. And I mean, this is why they should have thought this through. You either—if you’re going to do something like attack Iran, you have to know what the contingencies are,” Kinzinger replied, adding:

And honestly, those contingencies, you have to be willing to do them. Otherwise, you probably should not have gone into this fight in the first place. And so what does the future here look like? I don’t know. Are they going to find something that Iran wants? Maybe. Are they going to actually denuclearize them or whatever? I don’t know. Is there going to be an Iranian toll on every ship that passes?

But I know this much: I know that my kid who is four and a half years old is going to probably be in a country that has a worse situation based on what’s going on, because of this war, than had we done nothing. I think Donald Trump needs to figure out: if we resume hostilities with Iran, you need to have a plan in place to reopen that strait and stick to the use of the military until it’s done, or quit these threats because it’s just making it worse.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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