Former US secretary of state Antony Blinken says President Donald Trump is trapped in a corner of his own making in the unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran and is desperately searching for an off-ramp he cannot find.

In an interview Thursday with Kentucky Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, Blinken said Trump “wants to get out of the corner he’s put himself into. He’s been looking for an off-ramp, but he can’t find it.”

Trump, he added, “can’t accept the proposition that he’s also created an entirely new reality that didn’t exist before this war, which is the Strait of Hormuz.”

Blinken described the war as strategically lost for the United States.

“In addition to the Trump administration’s foreign policy mistakes, the US military is losing the war strategically, and now we are in a situation that the president seems to be in a corner that he can’t get out of,” he said. “Some have called it an escalation trap.”

The comments come as the US military continued its aggression across Iran for a 13th consecutive night. The attacks have struck civilian infrastructure, including bridges and water desalination plants, killing 55 people and wounding more than 640.

Iran has responded by launching might strikes against US-run military bases in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, and Erbil among others.

Blinken traced the current Persian Gulf crisis directly to Trump’s decision to abandon the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Calling the withdrawal a “catastrophic mistake,” Blinken noted that previous US administrations, Republican and Democratic, had carefully avoided actions that could push Iran to close the vital waterway.

He claimed that previous US administration were “careful” about the way they approached Iran, adding, “We knew that one thing that they could do would be to close the Strait of Hormuz. And it would be very difficult for us to open it again, absent some kind of land invasion of Iran, a country of 90 million people.”

Trump, Blinken argued, failed to think through the objectives or the risks to American forces stationed across the region.

“We have troops in the region, whether it’s in Saudi Arabia, whether it’s in the UAE, whether it’s in Qatar, whether it’s in Iraq, who would be endangered. And what have we seen? They closed the Strait and they’ve killed our troops. So this was not thought through, and beyond that, getting out of it now is very, very challenging,” Blinken said.

He identified two major constraints now facing the Trump administration: soaring energy prices that are damaging the US economy, and shortages of military munitions.

Blinken returned repeatedly to the JCPOA withdrawal as the root of the present disaster. “Trump back then said he didn’t like it. Tore it up, and replaced it with nothing.”

The Biden administration, he said, “inherited this mess from President Trump and it came back to bite him” in his second term. The decision left the United States isolated: “a terrible decision as evidenced by the fact that much of the country opposes it and we’re alone. We’re without allies and partners.”

He also criticized the lack of experienced negotiators. Mocking the current team of Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and JD Vance, Blinken said, “We also seem to be without experienced negotiators…. The team that’s been sent over [is] a son-in-law, a developer, [and a] vice president with no real background in this type of work.”

What was needed, he argued, were “genuine experts who knew Iran, knew nuclear issues, knew the whole thing that we needed to know in order to get a deal. And that absence of expertise I think is a critical flaw.”

Source: Presstv