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Former Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on Tuesday, though he held out some hope they’d have their intended effect.
“The strike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States was unwise and unnecessary. Now that it’s done, I very much hope it succeeded,” he wrote in a New York Times guest essay.
U.S. military B-2 stealth bomber aircraft dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on three nuclear facilities on Saturday in an attack Trump called “a spectacular military success.”
PROMINENT TRUMP CRITICS LAUD PRESIDENT’S DECISION TO STRIKE IRAN NUCLEAR SITES
Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned President Trump’s recent strikes on Iran. (Getty Images )
The president announced on Truth Social on Monday that both Israel and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire following the U.S. strikes, although a frustrated Trump lashed out at both countries on Tuesday morning for continued hostilities. The administration has since pushed back against media reports that the attacks did not obliterate Iran’s nuclear capabilities but instead were only a temporary setback.
Blinken not only trashed Trump’s strikes on Iran but criticized the president’s entire strategy in dealing with the country, which started with him tearing up former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and culminated in Saturday’s strikes.
“In 2018, President Trump tore up the agreement and replaced it with … nothing. In response, Iran accelerated its enrichment, quite likely reducing its breakout time to a matter of days or weeks. Mr. Trump, in essence, is now trying to put out a fire on which he poured gasoline,” Blinken said.
Blinken also argued Trump jumped the gun when there was still time for diplomacy with the Iranian regime.
TOP DEMOCRATS, MEDIA DECLARE US AT WAR AFTER IRAN STRIKES AS WHITE HOUSE PUSHES BACK ON NARRATIVE
Map of US strikes on Iran. (Fox News)
“As of now — and there are conflicting messages coming from within the Trump administration — our intelligence agencies believe Iran has not yet made a decision to weaponize. If and when it does, it would take Tehran 18 to 24 months to produce an explosive device, according to some estimates,” he said. “In other words, there was still time for diplomacy to work, and the situation wasn’t nearly the emergency that Mr. Trump portrayed it to be.”
He added, “Experts I’ve spoken to had real doubts about the ability of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or M.O.P. — the 30,000-pound bombs unique to America’s arsenal that were dropped on Iran’s nuclear sites — to fully incapacitate the Fordo site and other deeply buried or fortified components of Iran’s nuclear program.”
Trump ripped media critics on Tuesday that he accused of casting doubt on the effectiveness of his strikes. Singling out CNN, he said, “But when I see CNN, all night long, they’re trying to say, ‘Well, maybe it wasn’t really as demolished as we thought.’ It was demolished. You take a look at the pinpricks, and you see that place is gone. And I will say, I think CNN ought to apologize to the pilots of the B-2s.”
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Blinken did admit he hoped Trump’s attack was successful.
“I wish that he had played out the diplomatic hand we left him,” Blinken wrote. “Now that the military die has been cast, I can only hope that we inflicted maximum damage — damage that gives the president the leverage he needs to finally deliver the deal he has so far failed to achieve.”
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The White House did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.