Donald Trump Says Pete Hegseth First Suggested US Military Action Against Iran

NDTV | March 24, 2026 | 12:49 PM IST | Breaking News, Politics, World | Follow on Google News

Donald Trump Says Pete Hegseth First Suggested US Military Action Against Iran

US President Donald Trump has indicated that his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, may have been the one who pushed America towards launching a war on Iran. On Monday, Trump told the media that Hegseth was the first person on his team to suggest launching military operations against Tehran.

“I called Pete, I called General [Dan] Caine. I called a lot of our great people… And I said, ‘Let’s talk. We got a problem in the Middle East. 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. We can keep going and get that 50,000 up to 55 and 60, there’s no end, or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem,” Trump said at a Memphis Safe Task Force roundtable in Tennessee while sitting beside the Pentagon chief.

“And Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up, and you said, ‘Let’s do it, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,'” he added, turning to Hegseth.

He went on to praise Hegseth and claimed the United States was having “very good” discussions with Tehran, despite Iranian state media denying reports of any negotiations between the two warring nations.

Earlier, Trump had said that Vice President JD Vance, a long-time critic of foreign intervention, was less enthusiastic about the war than he was.

Per a Bloomberg report, it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch who advocated for a fight in Iran, while Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles were more sceptical about it.

Last week, when the former head of the National Counterterrorism Centre, Joe Kent, resigned over the war, he also claimed that Israel pushed the US into the war.

War In Iran
Trump on Monday delayed a deadline for Iran to open the strategic Strait of Hormuz for shipping or see its power stations targeted by airstrikes, briefly driving down oil prices and boosting stocks.

The delay offered a reprieve after the US and Iran traded threats over the weekend of strikes that could have cut electricity to millions in Iran and around the Gulf and knocked out desalination plants that provide many desert nations with drinking water while raising fears of possible catastrophe if nuclear plants were hit.

But any information on the talks described by Trump remains in dispute with Iran, which denied any talks had been held.

“No negotiations have been held with the US,” Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf posted on X, adding that “fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also said Israel will continue to strike Iran and Lebanon even as the U.S. considers a ceasefire. “There’s more to come,” he said.

Iranian missiles and drones, however, targeted Israel and Gulf Arab states on Tuesday. Iran fired three waves of missiles at Israel, with reports of an impact in the country’s north, the Israeli Home Front Command said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by VoM News staff and is published from the syndicated feed)

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