Trump Iran News Today: Why Gulf States Asked Him to Wait

President Donald Trump said in an interview released on Thursday 12 November that Saudi Arabia and four other Gulf states had asked him not to resume large-scale strikes on Iran. “Saudi Arabia has asked me to please just let it be the way it is now for a while,” he told the broadcaster Stephen A. Smith at the White House. He then named the others: “Qatar, if you look at that. Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain.”

The Trump Iran news today is his own explanation for why the strikes have not resumed: the Gulf states asked him to wait. “I’m not sure I agree with it,” he said. Asked whether he would have hit Iran again without the request, he answered: “Yes, I would.”

Hours later, early on Friday 13 November, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had destroyed an American early-warning radar in Bahrain, one of the five states Trump had named. The United States military and Bahrain’s government had not commented by Friday morning. The dated record of the diplomacy is on the Iran US talks tracker.

• Trump said Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain “would much prefer the waiting period,” and that he is holding off “at the request of the nations that I’m looking to protect.”
• He said he could destroy Iran’s energy, bridges and manufacturing in three days, and that without the Gulf request he would have struck again.
• The Revolutionary Guards said on Friday that they had hit a US radar in Bahrain in answer to an air attack on a telecommunications tower in Sirik, on Iran’s Hormuz coast. Nobody outside Iran has confirmed the strike.
• Trump made a similar disclosure on 18 May, when he wrote that the rulers of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates had asked him to call off an attack “scheduled for tomorrow.”

The interview came out hours after Trump wrote on Truth Social: “We don’t need a deal with Iran.” That post, and his instruction to Vice President JD Vance to leave the Iran file, are covered in Trump Iran Deal Today: Are the US-Iran Talks Over Now?

“So they’ve asked me to do that and I’m doing that,” Trump told Smith. “I’m not sure I agree with it, but we’ve taken them largely out.” He added: “I could end it immediately.”

“In one day their bridges are gone,” he said of Iran, listing energy and manufacturing beside them. “It would only take me three days.”

Republicans lost ground in the midterm elections on 3 November, and Vance wrote the next day that “the reason we lost is the war.” Trump told Smith: “Maybe the war was not unpopular as a war, but unpopular because of the fact that the gasoline prices were higher.” Brent crude settled at $95.82 a barrel on Thursday.

Earlier the same day the radio host Hugh Hewitt asked him what would happen if Iran killed a senior American official. “They will not exist very long any longer,” Trump replied. Asked whether he would use force again if allies were threatened, he said: “No, no hesitation.”

The Guards’ statement was carried by Iranian news agencies in the early hours of Friday. In the agencies’ translation it said the aerospace force acted “in response to the enemy’s aerial aggression against a telecommunications tower in Sirik” and had “targeted and destroyed the American aggressors’ early-warning radar on the island of Bahrain.”

The statement did not say who attacked Sirik, a port in Hormozgan province on the Strait of Hormuz, or what weapon the Guards used. It called the strike “a serious warning to the aggressor enemy to cease its aerial provocations and oil smuggling in the Strait of Hormuz.” Companies that work with the Americans on oil shipments, it said, “will face even more severe punitive measures.”

It is the first Iranian claim of a hit on an American military site in Bahrain since early September. On Thursday Jamal Shakerami, a senior adviser at a Guards security headquarters, said: “All US bases have now become accessible targets for the armed forces of the Islamic Republic.”

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, had addressed the host governments directly on Thursday. “No bilateral agreement or commitment with the United States can constitute legitimate grounds” for breaking international law, he wrote on X. Any state that took part, he wrote, “shall bear full responsibility.”

Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet and of US Naval Forces Central Command, at Naval Support Activity Bahrain in the Juffair district of Manama. The fleet was re-established there in 1995. Its area runs from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz to the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, and several thousand American personnel were based on the island before the war.

American aircraft also use Sheikh Isa Air Base in the south of the island. Iran lies about 200 kilometres away across the Gulf, inside the reach of its shortest-range missiles and drones, as set out in How Far Can Iran’s Missiles Reach?

Iranian missiles and drones struck the Fifth Fleet headquarters on 28 February, the first day of the war. Bahrain’s authorities said they had intercepted 188 missiles and 468 drones by 6 April. In June, US Central Command said missiles and drones fired at the headquarters had been shot down, contradicting an Iranian claim of damage. A Pentagon watchdog report in September counted hundreds of buildings damaged or destroyed at American installations in eight countries during the first four months.

The first marker is a statement from US Central Command or Bahrain’s interior ministry on the radar. Trump said on Thursday he would have “no hesitation” in using force again.

The second is whether Riyadh, Doha, Kuwait City, Abu Dhabi or Manama says anything in public about the request Trump described. The third is the Sirik attack, which no government has claimed.

Trump has now told Americans that the pause in the war is a favour to the Gulf states and that he could end it in three days. If the Bahrain claim is confirmed, the governments that asked for the waiting period will be the ones asked to justify it.