Marc Caputo joins the Washington Journal to analyze the White House's mixed mood during Iran's third week of conflict, highlighting $12 billion in spending and President Trump's push for a coalition to navigate mined waters. While officials avoid declaring war, Secretary Pete Hegseth contrasts his view of seven times previous intensity with Trump's "short-term excursion" claim, all while Iran demands non-U.S. currencies for Strait of Hormuz access. Ultimately, the segment reveals deep strategic friction regarding escalation traps and the administration's divergent timelines for ending the crisis. [Automatically generated summary]
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Thank you, everybody.
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On Tuesday, FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe will testify on global threats facing the United States.
The hearing comes as tensions escalate amid ongoing military strikes on Iran by the U.S. and Israel.
Watch the House Intelligence Committee hearing live at 2 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3.
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I think both optimism, frustration, and concern at the same time.
Optimism because they have the data, they say, from the Pentagon that shows all of their targets are being hit.
And according to them, they're ahead of schedule.
Lots of missile silos and drone factories and the like being blown up.
And the Iranian Navy is at the bottom of the water.
So that's the optimism part.
The frustration is with a lot of the reporting that and a lot of the commentary on social media that indicates Trump might have gotten himself into a quagmire and what's being commonly called an escalation trap.
And then the concern is obviously the Strait of Hormuz, which has closed and causing gas prices, oil prices, and therefore gas prices to rise.
If you mix those three things together, I think that sums up the mood of Donald Trump and this White House revolves so strongly around Donald Trump that it also describes not just the White House, but also the administration itself.
I mean, they say there was, and it would make sense that there was.
There is an open question about how carefully those plans were made, how widely they were shared, and how quickly a good plan was implemented.
And I don't really have answers to those questions, but certainly there is some reporting out there that Trump is frustrated with sort of the pace of this being closed and the fact that other countries aren't helping out.
Now he has called on them.
He called on them Saturday to help out an international coalition.
And the White House tells us, told the Wall Street Journal first, that he expects, Donald Trump expects that he will be able to announce what they're calling a Hormuz coalition of other countries to help escort vessels through the Strait of Hormuz and get more oil to the global market.
Well, certainly it doesn't help, especially if the military escort itself gets blown up.
And that's one of the great fears of this White House, perhaps of any Defense Department, is you don't want a multi-billion dollar piece of equipment sunk with a relatively cheap mine.
So, exactly what this looks like and at what point they think it's clear is a great question.
One of the reasons I think you haven't seen more action faster and more of these ships running through the strait is out of this concern.
There are allegedly, or we are told there are minesweepers there.
There is also reporting that some old minesweepers that were in the region and were scheduled to be decommissioned were pulled out of the region right before the war.
And that's leading some people to think that the planning wasn't so great.
What we do know in the short term is there is this chess game now happening between Washington and Tehran.
There's some reporting was from CNN that Tehran has said will open the straits, or at least one official said from the Iranian government, that they'll open the strait, but only to cargo oil cargo that is transaction in transacted in Shannon's and not in U.S. dollars.
Most, if not all, petrol contracts and oil contracts are used with the U.S. dollars.
It's sort of the world currency, so to speak.
And China, Iran, and a number of other countries, the BRICS countries, are trying to break that logjam.
And so Iran sees this as an opportunity to do that.
The White House officially isn't, but then the president does at different times.
So, you know, it's a war.
It's also a conflict.
And, you know, pick your poison here.
But the United States is spending something on the order or had spent on the order in the first 14 days or so, about $12 billion, expending all of his expensive ordnance, missiles, bombs, and spending it on the planes that have to take off and the personnel to staff the various military bases and the aircraft carriers and related strike groups.
So sure looks like a war to the people who are getting blown up, and it looks like a war to everyone else.
And whether the White House officially wants to admit that or not, who knows?
There is an irony, obviously, that Pete Hegseth was among those who insisted that the Department of Defense be renamed the War Department.
He constantly talks about warfighters, and now that war is going on, he's among those who are suggesting, like, well, this isn't war.
But then other times, he has said war is hell.
So, whatever, it is what it is.
It's a war, it's a conflict, and the ending of it is unclear at the moment.
Well, notably, the Secretary of War talked about the 12-day war and how this current conflict is expanding more ordnance.
So by his own definition, this is a war.
I do have to say that one thing the administration has been consistent about, the president, not so much, but he said on the opening of the conflict of the war on February 28th that there are four objectives.
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