white house Trump fudges his red line as Iran takes out a U.S. drone People who have consulted with the president say he’s hesitant to get entangled in another Middle East war.

Iran is inching closer to the tacit line President Donald Trump has set for taking military action against the regime: a dead American.

But rather than further inflame tensions between the two countries, the president on Thursday appeared to give Iran a pass when it came to the regime’s latest provocation: the downing of a U.S. drone over international waters, according to the Pentagon. Rather than pointing his finger at the regime, Trump instead fingered a rogue actor inside Iran for the aggression.


“I imagine someone made a mistake,” he told reporters, speaking from the Oval Office. “We didn't have a man or woman in the drone. It would have made a big, big difference.”

Even as the president’s friends and advisers in the administration and on Capitol Hill ratcheted up the rhetoric — Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) were both pushing Trump toward a military response, with Graham arguing on Twitter that “The only thing Iran and every other thuggish regime understands is Strength and Pain” — Trump has thus far remained immune to their pleas.

He has instead hewed to his 2016 campaign promise not to launch more unnecessary wars in the Middle East — something he referred back to on Thursday. "Look, I said I want to get out of these endless wars, I campaigned on that, I want to get out,” he told reporters.

Over the past week, the president has consulted with like-minded friends like Tucker Carlson, the Fox News Channel host who has used his prime-time program to inveigh against American involvement overseas, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), telling them he thinks national security adviser John Bolton is “very severe” and that a war with Iran would destroy his presidency. “John loves wars,” Trump has said.

“He doesn’t want to get engaged in more entanglements,” said a person who knows the president’s thinking on Iran. “I don’t think you’re going to get the president committing troops. I think you might see serious significant military tactical targeted strikes.”

"I don't think the president wants to go to war. There's no appetite to go to war in our country," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Yet the administration has not been entirely clear in drawing its red line for a retaliatory response. While senior officials have privately said a strike on an American ship or an attack on an American citizen would force a counterattack, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Paul Selva on Tuesday cast the net for possible U.S. retaliation more broadly, including an attack on “U.S. assets” under his umbrella.

“It’ll require an international consensus before force is used, with one specific caveat: If the Iranians come after U.S. citizens, U.S. assets or U.S. military, we reserve the right to respond with a military action, and they need to know that. It needs to be very clear,” Selva said.

The president summoned top congressional leaders in both parties to the White House on Thursday afternoon to discuss the situation, an indication that, though he seemed to diminish the drone attack, he and his aides are taking the larger threat seriously and looking to get bipartisan support should they decide to respond.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi convened a caucus meeting on Iran following her meeting at the White House and told members that the president had a slate of options to respond to the attack.

“He wouldn’t tell us what the option was, but he heard de-escalate, de-escalate, de-escalate," she said, according to sources in the room.

Top Democrats responded with fury Thursday night to reports Trump had authorized and then called off targeted strikes against the Islamic Republic.

In order to further tie the White House’s hands, Democrats are also pushing to attach an amendment to a defense policy bill that would require congressional approval for any Iranian conflict. Democrats have some leverage: Their support is required to end debate on the bill, and they can block it if they are unsatisfied.

“I told the president that these conflicts have a way of escalating," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said of Thursday afternoon’s White House meeting. "The president may not intend to go to war here, but we’re worried that he and the administration may bumble into the war. We told the room that the Democratic position is that congressional approval must be required before funding any kind of [action] in Iran. One of the best ways to avoid bumbling into a war, a war that nobody wants, is to have a robust and open debate and for Congress to have a real say. We’ve learned that lesson in the run up to Iraq,” Schumer said.

Pelosi concurred later in the day at a news conference.



Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for his part, said the White House was "engaged in measured responses."

Trump assailed his predecessor, Barack Obama, for his failure to take action after Syria violated the red line Obama laid out in 2012, warning the country’s strongman Bashar Assad that his use of chemical weapons would prompt an American response.

"If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!" Trump wrote on Twitter in April 2018, when the U.S., along with its British and French allies, bombed the country after a suspected chemical weapons attack that left dozens dead.

Yet even some of the most hawkish administration allies on Thursday praised the president’s seeming restraint, arguing that Iran was attempting to goad Trump into a confrontation and distract the administration from its “maximum pressure” campaign — designed to squeeze the country economically and force it back to the negotiating table.

“Don’t take the bait,” said Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a leading Iran hawk who has worked closely with the administration on Iran policy. Instead, Dubowitz encouraged Trump to “keep his eye on the ball” — that is, to continue the campaign of economic coercion that began in 2017 after he pulled out of the nuclear deal negotiated by Obama. Since then, the U.S. has slapped Iran with a raft of economic sanctions and declared the regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the country’s armed forces, a terrorist entity.

Both administration officials and outside observers noted that Iran appeared to be making a calculated effort to strike at the U.S. without provoking a military response.

“Iran is trying to hit us without causing a conflict. If we respond, that means they’ve miscalculated already,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Pentagon and State Department official in the Obama administration.

The drone downing on Thursday was the latest in a series of escalatory actions from Iran that began last weekend when, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, Revolutionary Guard members targeted two commercial vessels with limpet mines. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels reportedly fired cruise missiles into Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.

And despite the president’s claim that Thursday’s drone downing was a fluke, experts and former officials said it was most likely the latest attempt to provoke the U.S. and its allies without prompting a military response.

“It’s pretty obvious that the Iranians are working everywhere they can to try to get the U.S. to back off the sanctions and the approach we’ve taken to Iran and to drive fissures in relationships and alliances,” said retired Adm. William “Fox” Fallon, a former head of U.S. Central Command, the headquarters that oversees U.S. military activity in the Middle East. “It was unmanned, but this was a big, expensive aircraft.”

Burgess Everett, Heather Caygle and Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.