Pete Buttigieg criticized President Donald Trump for not grasping the long-term consequences of entering another Middle East war, suggesting he “unleashed forces” in Iran he doesn’t “know how to contain.”
On the latest episode of “Raging Moderates,” the former Transportation Secretary warned that Trump getting the U.S. mired in another conflict in the Middle East could have far reaching effects that might last for years. Buttigieg was also concerned about the loss of American lives, as the death count in the new war reached 13.
“You think about Vietnam – nobody thought that that was going to last a long time. Nobody thought that was really going to lead to major troops on the ground,” Buttigieg said. “It started with advisers and then it was troops and then it was more troops and then it was years and years and years. You know, when I got to Afghanistan as a lieutenant – that was 13 years into the war – and I thought I was one of the last troops turning out the lights, and it was almost a decade more before that conflict was over.”
He added: “So, they’ve unleashed forces that I don’t think even they know how to contain and we don’t know what the consequences will be to our economy or in terms of how many more troops have to go out there.”
Three weeks into this new war with Iran, and Trump’s administration has received much pushback. Much of it comes from the political left, but the president has also been targeted by allies like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson – both of whom decried the country getting tangled up in another conflict abroad.
“My own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country. I don’t think those four service members died for the United States. I think they died for Iran or for Israel,” Kelly said on her SiriusXM show after the initial attacks. “I understand how this helps Iran perfectly well. They seem rather jubilant, 80% of the country does not support the Ayatollah. He was a terrible, terrible man. No one is crying that he’s dead, no normal person, but our government’s job is not to look out for Iran or for Israel. It’s to look out for us. And this feels very much to me like it is clearly Israel’s war.”
The president has also demonstrated unpreparedness following the first strikes, as his administration did not have plans for how to get Americans out of the Middle East and – more recently – how to deal with the Strait of Hormuz blockade.
The last several days the president has been placing public pressure on numerous U.S. allies for help defending the Strait of Hormuz. Mostly recently, he made his case to Japan to help in that effort, insisting that Japan’s reliance on imported oil from the Middle East makes clearing the Strait of Hormuz a necessity for the Asian nation.
Watch Buttigieg’s full commentary above.
