Trump on Iran Conflict: Troops Staying Until ‘We Have a Completion’

President Donald Trump said U.S. troops would remain deployed in the Middle East until the ongoing U.S. military operation in Iran is completed.

“It costs us very little to keep them there. I don’t consider them in danger,” the president said, speaking with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 7.

“I think we’ll keep them there until such time as we have a completion, and when we have a completion, you will see things as you’ve never seen,” he added. “The oil will go down, the stock market already, as you know, it’s hit an all-time high. Even in the midst of it, it hit all-time highs.”

Roughly 50,000 U.S. troops have been deployed to the region. Since the conflict began on Feb. 28, 13 have been killed, which Trump said was “too many, but … less than anybody has ever even envisioned.”

However, Trump also emphasized that military strikes have decimated Iran’s leadership and chain of command and eliminated the Iranian Navy.

A multi-month ceasefire between Iran and the United States remains in place as the two nations negotiate an end to the conflict, and Trump expressed confidence that those negotiations are going well.

“We’re having very good negotiations with the people that are leading the country now,” Trump said. “It’s the third group that we’ve been dealing with, and they are different, and you could say it’s regime change, actually, because these are very different people. I find them to be more rational, very smart.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators earlier this month that Iranian officials have become open to discussing aspects of their nuclear program, and Trump said during his interview that Iranian officials “conceded the fact that they will not have nuclear weapons.”

The president also signaled that he was open to Iran and the United States eliminating the regime’s nuclear stockpiles and removing enriched uranium together.

“If we make a deal, now we’re friendly, we’ll all go together,” he said. “It’ll be our equipment. We’ll take it out and destroy it, whether it’s on site or whether we take it off-site.”

However, Trump also said that he is prepared to restart military action against the Islamic regime if he doesn’t think a deal is going to happen. In that case, U.S. forces would eliminate Iran’s uranium by force.

“If we don’t make a deal, then we’re going to take them out militarily, very harshly, and we’ll wait ‘til we do that before we go, in which case we’ll have safety either way.”

Meanwhile, the United States continues to enforce a blockade over the Strait of Hormuz, a naval choke point through which a fifth of the world’s oil moved before the conflict began, to prevent the Islamic regime from being able to sell its most important export.

“They’re losing [$400 million] to $500 million a day,” Trump said of Iran due to the blockade in his interview. “It’s not sustainable for them. They have an economy that’s shot, in addition to everything else.”

Despite the blockade and military action, the president declined to call the hot-fire conflict with Iran a war, preferring to call it a “military exercise.”