Trump orders new wave of strikes against Iran: RPT

All right, and continuing to discuss developments in the Middle East. Let's go ahead and take another live look here at Tel Aviv, Israel, and again at the White House on this Friday night. The US is launching a new air campaign against Iran as peace talks appear to be on the back burner. Meanwhile, the scope of the conflict could be crossing into American soil. Fox's Anna Eliopoulos reports. As the war with Iran marches on, President Trump says the US is carrying out a new round of heavy airstrikes against the regime. We'll be hitting them very hard. And at some point, they're gonna say we just can't take it anymore. The new barrage comes as both countries have been trading attacks. Iran launched a flurry of missiles at a US military base in Jordan earlier this week. CENTCOM says all of them were intercepted. And our guys were there, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Iran claims it did hit two oil tankers on Friday that were attempting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. It says four others decided to turn around. The war that has a regional wide effects is an advantage for Iran, because it triggers the fear of the spread of the chaos, the fear of the instability in both security wise and energy wise. The conflict could even be making its way to US soil, with Iran potentially behind a cyber attack on dozens of water systems in Minnesota. This is the Iranians trying to go after the American people where we live. Everyone, and it's everywhere from Minnesota to Texas, needs to be on high alert cuz we don't know what's here. The president though downplaying Iran's involvement. And they blame it on Iran. I don't think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota cuz they're grossly incompetent. The New York Times reported hackers targeted infrastructure used to manage and monitor water towers. The FBI tells Fox it's not currently blaming Iran, but it is investigating. Anna Eliopoulos, Fox News. The Wall Street Journal putting this online today saying President Trump has ordered a fresh attack on Iran aimed at getting Tehran to surrender. That could begin as soon as this weekend and would last a few days. That's according to US officials. Well, let's now be joined by James Robbins, senior vice president of the Institute of World Politics and former Pentagon official. Hello, thank you so much for joining us here on Live Now. Hi, thank you for having me. So the president is weighing attacks. James, do you see indications that there could be significant escalations this weekend? I think so, based on what we heard. If the target group is going to expand to things like their energy infrastructure, their transportation infrastructure, their electrical grid, things like that. It will be a lot more punishing than the strikes that we've seen recently, which have mainly been focused in the Strait of Hormuz area. Taking out mainly military targets like drone sites and small vessels and things of that nature. So widening the scope to the rest of the country and taking out these other kinds of targets would constitute quite an escalation. Yeah, let's continue to talk about that because Axios is reporting the US is considering launching strikes against energy targets in Iran. Are there any repercussions to this? Well, as you might guess in the energy markets, there probably would be repercussions where we would see another spike in oil prices. We've kind of left those targets untouched so far because we didn't wanna see long term effects like that where it just goes up and doesn't come down because we'd be threatening part of the global energy supply. But it seems like the president is just simply frustrated with the Iranians. He did want, supposedly, to leave parts of their energy economy together for the post-war period, and especially if they had a change in government. But it could be that he's just saying, you know what, let's just take it all out. Just bomb Karg Island, bomb their liquid natural gas refineries and things like that. It could be that that's the point where he's at. And if he does that, it will have long term negative effects probably on energy markets. Well, could Iran retaliate against Gulf region states and their energy infrastructure? Well, yes, I mean, they actually have been doing that. And that's what they threatened when it was reported, at least, that the president was contemplating this type of escalation. Iran said that they were gonna hit back at other energy states in the region. They've already hit some of them, either directly or through their proxies, whether it's Qatar or UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi, everybody, basically. And these energy targets are pretty much hard to defend, particularly against drone strikes. You have mass wave of drones that get in there. Only a few of them need to hit to make an impact. I mean, we've seen that in Ukraine war, for example, where they've been punishing the Russians that way. So even though our allies can defend themselves and we're gonna help them defend themselves, it really wouldn't take a lot for the Iranians to be as disruptive to them as we can be the Iranians. You can see there on your screen, we're taking a live look at Tel Aviv, Israel. I have this image on our screen because Israel could be involved in these strikes. Why would Israel rejoin the campaign at this point? You know, that's a really interesting part of this because you'll notice in Iran's own escalation over the last several weeks, they've attacked a lot of countries, but they haven't attacked Israel. And in the first part of this war, they were attacking Israel quite a bit. Indiscriminate bombing with cluster munitions on civilian areas and things like that, and the Israelis were hitting back very hard. And then Iran stopped attacking Israel. I think they're actually afraid of the Israelis. Because even though the United States has been conducting a limited war, with sort of limited strikes with very specific purposes, the Israelis are the ones who took out the leadership. And I think the Israelis would be willing to do it again. And probably in the plan that the president is contemplating, that would be their role to attack the IRGC, to attack the hardliners, whoever they are, the people holding up progress. So yes, Iran at that point will have to respond to Israel. But it's really significant that so far the Iranians have been leaving the Israelis alone. And that detail that the strikes could involve Israel is according to reporting from Axios, I wanted to mention that. James, what would a major bombing campaign do to US weapons stockpiles? Is this something that has been in the news this week? Well, every weapon we use is one that we don't have and that we have to replace. We built down our defense industrial infrastructure quite a bit after the Iraq war. And now we have this new conflict that we're involved in. And it's not that we're out of ammunition. It's just that we want to have a certain level of reserve for various contingencies and for deterrence purposes. What if something started happening in Taiwan, for example, or some other part of the world? We wanna have enough residual to be able to tell other adversaries that if they do anything, we're gonna be able to respond. So it's really not a question of us being, we're down to the last missile or something like that. It's just that we're getting below the level where the planners like to see. And the only way to solve that issue is to reindustrialize. We have to start coming up with more weapons, but also better weapons and less expensive weapons. Because if there's one lesson that we're getting from Ukraine, it's that we can't fire million dollar patriots at $1,000 drones. It just doesn't make sense. And so now the push is on to find newer and cheaper ways to defeat all of these new weapon systems that we're seeing have been very effective on the battlefield. And of course, the weekend is just about upon us. Anything you wanna leave us with, what are you watching for as the hours continue to go by? What are you keeping your eye on? Well, I don't think that the president is gonna tell us what his timetable is, number one. And particularly because he wants to take the Iranians by surprise if that's the case. So you recall when this war broke out, everybody thought it was gonna start at a certain time during the day, and then it didn't. And then the adversaries came out of their hidey holes, and then they got hit. So I think that whatever people think the timing of this is, it's probably gonna be different. But the Iranians, they should definitely be taking an extra look at what their protocols are for dealing with our type of attacks, because I don't think they'll see it coming. All right, James Robbins, we appreciate you coming on the show, sharing your expertise and your insight on this. Thank you.