US President Donald Trump has suggested that Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was the first senior official in his administration to push for military action against Iran. Speaking at a roundtable with military and law enforcement leaders on Monday, Trump described internal discussions that preceded the US decision to join strikes alongside Israel. Framing Iran as a long-standing threat, he said: “We have a country known as Iran that for 47 years has been just a purveyor of terror… and they’re very close to having a nuclear weapon.”He went on to present the choice as stark, adding: “We can keep going… or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem.” It was at that point, Trump claimed, that Hegseth intervened decisively. “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up… you said, ‘Let’s do it, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.’”The remarks appear to shift responsibility for the war’s early momentum onto the Pentagon chief, even as the administration offers varying explanations for the intervention. Officials have alternately argued that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat and that US involvement was inevitable given Israel’s trajectory.Trump’s comments came hours after he insisted that Iran’s retaliatory strikes across the Gulf had caught Washington off guard. “Nobody was even thinking about it,” he said, despite reports that US intelligence had warned of possible reprisals.At the same time, the president struck a more conciliatory tone on diplomacy, claiming that talks with Iranian intermediaries were under way. “We’d like to make a deal,” he said, adding that if negotiations failed, “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.” Iranian officials have denied that any such discussions are taking place.In a sign of shifting tactics, Trump also extended a deadline for further US strikes on Iranian infrastructure by five days, while reiterating that Washington’s central demand remains the dismantling of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. “We want to see no nuclear bomb… not even close to it,” he said.
