{"id":49070,"date":"2026-04-12T00:28:51","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T00:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/49070\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T00:28:51","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T00:28:51","slug":"trump-speech-on-iran-war-and-recent-remarks-on-oil-nato-daycare-costs-land-with-a-thud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/49070\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump speech on Iran war and recent remarks on oil, NATO, daycare costs land with a thud"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

President Trump\u2019s meandering speech<\/a> on the Iran war late Wednesday \u2014 in which he paired promises of a swift exit with new threats of escalated bombing and denied responsibility for the Strait of Hormuz \u2014 did little to assuage U.S. allies and world markets concerned about the conflict\u2019s ongoing disruptions to the global oil supply.<\/p>\n

Stocks dropped after markets opened Thursday and oil prices soared, with the price of U.S. crude oil jumping more than 10%, to above $110.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the speech, diplomats from more than 40 nations<\/a> \u2014 not including the U.S. \u2014 met to strategize on how to lift Iran\u2019s continued stranglehold on the strait, the vital oil corridor that the U.S.-Israeli war drove Iran to restrict but which Trump on Wednesday said wasn\u2019t his problem.<\/p>\n

Iranian officials remained unbowed, asserting the U.S. and Israel \u201cknow nothing\u201d of its remaining capabilities, that \u201cnot a single life will be spared\u201d if either attempts a ground incursion into its territory, and that \u201cevery last\u201d Iranian would become a soldier if necessary.<\/p>\n

\u201cIranians don\u2019t just talk about defending their country. They bleed for it,\u201d Iranian parliament Speaker Mohammad Qalibaf, a pugilistic figure and one of Iran\u2019s most prominent wartime voices, wrote on X. \u201cYou come for our home\u2026 you\u2019re gonna meet the whole family. Locked, loaded, and standing tall. Bring it on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, remarks Trump made earlier Wednesday about leaving NATO elicited subtle rebukes from both international and domestic allies, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), while the president\u2019s comments about the U.S. not being able to focus on social services like Medicare or other domestic needs such as child care as it wages its foreign war sparked outrage at home.<\/p>\n

Far from a call for a unified push to end the war alongside allies, Trump\u2019s speech \u2014 his first formal address to the nation since the war began a month ago \u2014 further isolated the U.S. and the Trump administration on the global stage.<\/p>\n

Trump firmly asserted in his speech that reopening the Strait of Hormuz to oil tanker traffic was not the responsibility of the U.S., despite it causing the war, because it receives less oil from the corridor than other nations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They could do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on,\u201d Trump said. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo those countries that can\u2019t get fuel, many of which refuse to get involved in the decapitation of Iran \u2014 we had to do it ourselves \u2014 I have a suggestion: No. 1, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much,\u201d Trump continued. \u201cAnd No. 2, build up some delayed courage.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said those nations should have been better assisting the U.S. in its war effort already, but should now \u201cgo to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIran has been essentially decimated,\u201d he said. \u201cThe hard part is done, so it should be easy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has consistently downplayed the threat Iran continues to pose in the region. And securing the strait \u2014 which runs along Iran\u2019s mountainous coast, full of strategic locations from which Iranian forces can threaten ship traffic \u2014 is not an easy task, as was acknowledged by the foreign diplomats meeting to solve the issue without the U.S. on Thursday. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have seen Iran hijack an international shipping route to hold the global economy hostage,\u201d said U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Macron, speaking in South Korea, said the U.S. \u201ccan hardly complain afterward that they are not being supported in an operation they chose to undertake alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Macron also slammed Trump\u2019s criticism of NATO, which Trump called a \u201cpaper tiger<\/a>\u201d in remarks prior to his speech Wednesday. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you cast doubt on your commitment every day, you erode its very substance,\u201d Macron said.<\/p>\n

Trump for weeks has suggested that NATO allies who declined to join the U.S. war had failed to live up to their treaty obligations, and that remaining in the alliance may not be worth it for the U.S., though he made no mention of NATO in his Wednesday evening speech.<\/p>\n

Trump has no power to unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from NATO. That power sits with Congress \u2014 where Trump\u2019s own allies downplayed the idea.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got an awful lot of people who think that NATO is a very critical, incredibly successful post-World War II alliance,\u201d Thune said. \u201cI think in the world today, you need allies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s formal speech appeared to be geared in part toward his allies at home, including his MAGA base, where frustrations with the war have mounted among the cohort of Trump supporters who\u2019d championed his \u201cAmerica First\u201d message and campaign promises to extricate the U.S. from foreign entanglements, not start new ones.<\/p>\n

Trump said he has promised since his first foray into politics in 2015 that he would never let Iran develop a nuclear weapon. He told Americans listening that the war \u201cis a true investment in your children, and your grandchildren\u2019s future,\u201d because it was making the world safer.<\/p>\n

However, Trump exacerbated frustrations over the war\u2019s distraction from domestic priorities with separate comments he made earlier on Wednesday at a private Easter luncheon, video of which the White House posted online and then deleted.<\/p>\n

In those remarks, Trump said U.S. military needs had to take priority over social services and other major costs for Americans, such as child care, which maybe states could pay for by increasing taxes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThey can do it on a state basis. You can\u2019t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s political opponents leaped on the remarks as out of touch.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump says we can pay for war in Iran but can\u2019t afford childcare,\u201d Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) wrote on X, before asserting that the billions of dollars the U.S. has spent in Iran could have been used to offset Americans\u2019 daycare costs.<\/p>\n

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, in response, accused Democrats and the media of taking Trump\u2019s remarks \u201cout of context,\u201d and claiming he was only talking about \u201cstopping the scams\u201d and rooting out fraud in such programs. <\/p>\n

Democrats also took broader swipes at Trump\u2019s framing of the war.<\/p>\n

\u201cDonald Trump\u2019s month-long war with Iran has come at a big cost to taxpayers and has tragically taken the lives of 13 American service members. He dragged our country into a conflict that rattled markets, drove up gas prices, squeezed working families, and further destabilized the Middle East,\u201d Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) wrote on X. \u201cWith his poll numbers falling to record lows, Trump is now trying to cut and run with little to show for it. He started this unauthorized war with no clear or consistent justification and the consequences of his choices won\u2019t disappear when he walks away.\u201d<\/p>\n

United Nations Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres on Thursday said the war was \u201cinflicting immense human suffering and already triggering devastating economic consequences,\u201d and called directly on the U.S. and Israel to end it. He also called on Iran to \u201cstop attacking their neighbors\u201d and \u201crespect navigational rights and freedoms along critical maritime routes, including the Strait of Hormuz.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cConflicts do not end on their own,\u201d Guterres said. \u201cThey end when leaders choose dialogue over destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to defending NATO, Macron and other French politicians on Thursday were also reacting to Trump mocking Macron in his remarks Wednesday. He mimicked a French accent while accusing Macron of only wanting to aid the U.S. war effort once the battle had been \u201cwon\u201d and referenced a moment last year when Brigitte Macron was caught on video pushing her husband\u2019s face, which he said was them joking with each other.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is too much talk, and it\u2019s all over the place,\u201d Macron said, according to French newspaper Le Monde<\/a>. \u201cWe all need stability, calm, a return to peace \u2014 this isn\u2019t a show!\u201d<\/p>\n

Ya\u00ebl Braun-Pivet, president of France\u2019s lower house of parliament, told the French broadcaster franceinfo that the Iran war is \u201chaving consequences for the lives of millions of people, people are dying on the battlefield, and we have a president who is laughing, who is mocking others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Times staff writer Nabih Bulos in Beirut contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Trump\u2019s meandering speech on the Iran war late Wednesday \u2014 in which he paired promises of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49071,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[20022,20021,20018,34,196,1376,1486,213,722,20020,20019,1219,392,679,2863,20023],"class_list":{"0":"post-49070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iran","8":"tag-child-care","9":"tag-daycare","10":"tag-foreign-war","11":"tag-iran","12":"tag-iran-war","13":"tag-macron","14":"tag-nato","15":"tag-oil","16":"tag-president-trump","17":"tag-recent-remark","18":"tag-speech","19":"tag-strait","20":"tag-trump","21":"tag-u-s-ally","22":"tag-wednesday","23":"tag-world-market"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116337110085361181","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49070"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62921,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49070\/revisions\/62921"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}