President Donald Trump said Sunday that he would like to “take the oil in Iran” and is considering seizing the export hub of Kharg Island, which is responsible for more than 90% of Iran’s oil exports.
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In an interview with the Financial Times, Trump said his “preference would be to take the oil.”
“To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the U.S. say: ‘Why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,” he said.
The interview marks some of Trump’s most direct comments about his thinking on what to do with Iran’s oil.
In an interview with NBC News this month, Trump sidestepped answering whether he had plans to try to take Iran’s oil.
“You look at Venezuela,” he said. “People have thought about it, but it’s too soon to talk about that.”
In January, the U.S. captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and proceeded to take more control over the country’s oil industry.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.
Trump told the Financial Times on Sunday that the U.S. has “a lot of options,” including potentially taking Kharg Island, a rare island made of hard coral off Iran.
“Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t. We have a lot of options,” Trump said. “It would also mean we had to be there [in Kharg Island] for a while.”
Oil prices have skyrocketed around the globe as the war continues, with U.S. crude oil costing over $100 a barrel Sunday.
Thousands more U.S. troops are heading to the Middle East, with the USS Tripoli arriving on Saturday as part of a complement of 3,500 troops. But Trump and his administration continue to signal that they are working to negotiate a 15-point proposal to end the war.
Trump declined Sunday to offer specific details about whether a ceasefire deal could be reached in the coming days to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway used to move about 20% of the world’s oil exports.
“We’ve got about 3,000 targets left — we’ve bombed 13,000 targets — and another couple of thousand targets to go,” Trump said in the Financial Times interview. “A deal could be made fairly quickly.”