US Vice President JD Vance gave an interview to Newsmax on Friday in which he commented on the United States' military buildup in the Persian Gulf amid tensions with Iran over its deadly crackdown on anti-regime protesters.
Vance stated that President Donald Trump "wanted to make sure if the Iranians, god forbid, did something very stupid, then we have the resources to respond to it."
"The President obviously has a lot of cards he can play," Vance told Newsmax. "I'm not gonna reveal how he plays them. We just want to make sure that we have options. We have a lot of forces in the region. We have people who could be endangered."
He further stated that the US must "make sure we have people over there to protect our assets in that part of the world," including in countries such as Saudi Arabia.
Vance’s comments come a day after Trump again issued a stark warning to Iran, during an in‑flight briefing with reporters on his return from Davos to Washington, describing a significant US military buildup in the region.
“We have a lot of ships going in that direction, just in case. We have a big flotilla going in that direction. And we'll see what happens," Trump said. “We have a big force going toward Iran. I'd rather not see anything happen, but we're watching them very closely."
Trump again said that he prevented hundreds of executions in Iran last week. “I stopped 837 hangings [last] Thursday. They would have been dead. Every one of them would have been hung. This is like from a thousand years ago," he said.
“I said ‘if you hang those people, you're going to be hit harder than you've ever been hit. It'll make what we did to your Iran nuclear look like peanuts.’ And an hour before this horrible thing was going to take place, they canceled it. And they actually said they canceled it. They didn't postpone it. They canceled it. So that was a good sign."
On Wednesday, Trump commented on the recent tensions with Iran in an interview with CNBC and said, “We hope there’s not going to be further action. They were shooting people indiscriminately on the streets and they were going to hang 837, mostly young people" after he threatened to hit them hard if they harmed protesters.
A day earlier, Trump warned that the US would respond forcefully if Iran kills protesters or acts on assassination threats against him.
"I have very firm instructions: Anything happens, they're going to wipe them off the face of this earth," he told Newsnation.
(Arutz Sheva-Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)