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Trump Meets with Advisers on Iran; Iran Shoots down U.S. Drone; Revolutionary Guard Takes Responsibility for Drone; Pentagon Briefing on U.S. Drone Incident; Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired June 20, 2019 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:00:00] JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Proving as the Pentagon says this unmanned drone was in international airspace. Iran says it shot it down -- the Revolutionary Guard says it shot it down because it crossed the line and violated Iranian airspace. So Iran says it was a provocation. The Pentagon says it was unprovoked.

Again, we're going to get some key details on this in just a moment.

As we wait, I want to check in live at the White House with CNN's Abby Phillip.

Abby, the president is in a meeting with his top advisers trying to sort out what to do. He calls it a very big mistake. That normally means there will be a very big response. Do we know anything about the options the president is considering?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, I don't think we really know where this is all heading because the contours of this problem for President Trump are, for several weeks now he has been pushing back against his advisers, pushing back against the idea that he might be dragged into some kind of conflict with Iran. Remember, just earlier this week he called an earlier attack by Iran on some oil tankers a very minor incident. And our sources were telling us that inside the White House the president has been downplaying all of these acts of aggression or attention seeking or whatever you want to call it from Iran.

But today the question is, does this incident with the drone change the dynamic for the president? We don't know yet and we may not know until they've -- the president's aides have had a chance to really debrief him on all of what's going on here. But we do know that this is a president who is very resistant to this. He does not think that this is in his interests.

But he has a lot of hawkish advisers, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, his national security advisor, John Bolton. And then he has what seems to be a very big power vacuum over at the Pentagon where there is so much turmoil in the senior leadership. So I think we are just waiting to see whether this is enough to change his mind.

He has previously said that he would go -- he would go to war with Iran over nuclear weapons. On the other stuff, he called it a big question mark. This is the part that is a big question mark. And as the administration takes on a more aggressive posture in response to all of this, the question always will come back to the commander in chief, as the decider in this situation, where does he come down on this? And I think we'll finding out in the coming minutes and hours. He is, at the moment, meeting with the Canadian prime minister on a slew of somewhat separate issues, but it could be our first opportunity to hear from him this morning, John.

KING: Abby Phillip at the White House. We will stay in touch throughout the hour. Again, we're told this Pentagon briefing being streamed in from Central Command headquarters. It will begin any minute now.

As we wait, I want to go live to Ryan Browne, live at the Pentagon.

Ryan, forgive me if I have to interrupt you for this briefing.

But the president says it is a very big mistake. The Pentagon says it is -- there is no doubt in its view this drone was in international airspace when it was shot down by surface-to-air missiles. What are we expecting from this briefing?

RYAN BROWNE, CNN REPORTER: Well, John, we're being told that the commander of all air operations in the Middle East will be briefing. And we are told that -- to expect information about where the drone was located. We're told altitude, distance from land, evidence the Pentagon says that will clearly show that the aircraft was in international airspace when it was shot down by this Iranian missile.

Now, the type of drone is worth noting. It's an RQ-4. It's one of the largest drones in the U.S. fleet. It's massive. You don't use this kind of thing to do clandestine operations. So it would be extremely unusual for it to have intentionally been sent into Iranian airspace for some kind of spying operation.

So, again, the U.S. military feeling very confident that this was, in fact, in international airspace. Iran taking credit for shooting it down, claiming that it had strayed into Iranian airspace. The Pentagon going to attempt to make its case this hour.

KING: Ryan, stand by as well. Obviously, and, again, we're waiting for the briefing any second. CNN is blessed to have our Fred Pleitgen live in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

Fred, we have had, in past stories, past instances, where sometimes the Revolution Guard gets out over its skis, if you will. We have a Revolutionary Guard statement taking responsibility, saying that this drone, in its view, crossed into Iranian airspace. Are we hearing from other aspects and elements of the Iranian government or is the Revolutionary Guard taking the lead here?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi, John.

Well, the Revolutionary Guard certainly took the lead very early on after this happened. It was quite interesting to see because usually they're quite a secretive organization. But the head of the Revolutionary Guard, he came out very early in the morning hours and confirmed it, yes, this drone had been shot down. Made quite a bellicose statement saying that, quote, this was the way that Iran deals with its enemies.

But now, as the day progresses, there are other elements of the Iranian government that are making statements as well. And it was quite interesting to see because just a couple of minutes after President Trump made his -- or tweeted his first response that Iran had made a big mistake, Iran's foreign minister has now come out and tweeted a tweet of his own. He said, this is a quote, the U.S. wages economic terrorism on Iran -- that's the Iranians referring to the U.S. leaving the nuclear agreement and levying sanctions on Iran -- has conducted covert action against us and now encroaches on our territory. We don't seek war, but will zealously defend our skies, land and waters. We'll take this new aggression to the U.N. and show the U.S. is lying about international waters. So the Iranians, from their side at least, are saying they're also quite confident that they believe that this drone was shot down over their territory.

[12:05:23] And, John, just another word from the Iranians because they have, you know, some very, very strong language throughout the day. One of the things that the head of the Revolutionary Guard also said earlier today, he said, while Iran does not want war, he said the shooting down of this drone also makes very clear that Iran is absolutely ready for war.

John.

KING: Fred Pleitgen live in Tehran. Fred, please stay with us as well.

Again, we're waiting for the lieutenant general from Central Command to brief. Any moment now. It will be an audio briefing, not a video briefing, but we'll bring you to the details live as soon as it starts to happen. That's why you're watching the Pentagon Briefing Room on the right of your screen.

Meanwhile, let's discuss in the room here. Joining me to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's Kylie Atwood, CNN's Phil Mattingly, our military and diplomatic affairs analyst, retired Rear Admiral John Kirby, and Eliana Johnson with "Politico."

Admiral, I want to start with you.

You've stood at that podium. You've stood at the State Department. You were part of putting the Iran nuclear deal together. I just want to put your P\pentagon hat on at the moment.

REAR ADMIRAL JOHN KIRBY (RET.), CNN DIPLOMATIC ANALYST: Sure.

KING: If they have the evidence that this drone was in international airspace, then it is an unprovoked attack over international airspace by Iran.

KIRBY: Right.

KING: If you're sitting in a room and you've got a -- the president wants options, what would they be? KIRBY: From a military perspective, he would certainly be in his

right, because this is a technically hostile act in international airspace, in his right to invoke Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which is the right of self-defense.

Now, there's two things about that. It has to be of necessity, and I think they can prove the point that there's a necessity for self- defense, and then it has to be proportional. And so what does that mean? Well, that's where you get into all the difficulties and the complications of what options are before you.

KING: Shot with a surface-to-air missile. Do you take out a missile launcher?

KIRBY: Well, here's the thing. So they have proven now that they can -- they can shoot with accuracy and with great range into this international airspace. So now you have to consider that anything within the range of Iranian air defenses is contested airspace, even if it's in international, which further constrains your military options.

KING: And, Kylie, to you, from the State Department perspective, this is a major, risky, dangerous, I could keep adding adjectives, escalation, Iran shooting down a U.S. drone. It comes at a time of enormous mistrust between the United States and Iran, a thousand troops on their way. The Pentagon saying there is no doubt, the secretary of state saying there's no doubt that Iran was responsible for the attacks on those tankers.

But you do see, when you call around the world to even traditional, strong U.S. allies, some skepticism, some doubt, we want to see more evidence.

How important is it that the Pentagon here clear up any doubt?

And I want to tell our viewers, you're watching Justin Trudeau on the right there with President Trump. It's the left of your screen. But in the right of that photo, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, going into a previously scheduled meeting at the White House.

There is this trust deficit. So I find it interesting and of the moment, if you will, that the Pentagon decided so quickly to come forward and have this briefing where Ryan Browne tells us they want to lay out the ping data, they want to show us, here's where this drone was. The Iranians are lying.

KYLIE ATWOOD, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: And that is different than what we've been seeing. This has been escalating, these threats, these assaults from Iran, right? First they went after commercial ships in the region. Then they went after some pipelines, oil pipelines, going into Saudi Arabia. Then they went after oil tankers in the region. They have truly been escalating. But the U.S., the Trump administration, has not been laying out their evidence quite explicitly as we expect that they could do today. Obviously we did see some evidence that they rolled out when it came to the attack on the oil tankers.

But, today, they're showing that when you go after a U.S. asset, they are going to come forth and provide some evidence as to what they have seen and potentially how they're going to react. But we don't know how the president's going to react yet.

KING: We don't know. And one of the thing the president sometimes like is this uncertainty, this debate, this unpredictability about how he handles foreign crisis. And he likes, he says, the fact that there's wide disagreement sometime among his advisers. At a moment like this, hours after a drone has been shot out of the sky, that uncertainty, unpredictability can add to the confusion, the complications and the risk of a miscalculation.

We know that John Bolton, for example, the national security adviser, on record for years saying he believe you need to have regime change. Mike Pompeo, a hawk when it comes to Iran. The president, in several interviews recently, trying to dial everybody back saying there's nothing to worry about, I don't want war. If they went nuclear, then there might be a war, but I want to try to find something out. What do we make of sort of the -- I don't mean to trivialize this, but the who's on first aspect of this?

ELIANA JOHNSON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think it's important to note that the president himself has been the one pumping the brakes about responding to the three previous incidents. And administration officials have noted that but have also said that they are drawing the line at striking an American asset. And it's interesting, they've made the point that the Iranians had been very careful up until today that any attack on an American ship or an American citizen would demand a response. And so I think this is sort of Trump's red line moment. Administration officials, though not the president himself, had drawn this red line. Iran seems to have crossed it. Now what will the president do? He's been by far the most reluctant.

[12:10:12] Now, I think the point of this briefing here is, when the president is by his nature divisive, I think the point of this briefing here, not conducted by the president himself but by a military, is to unite the country, I think, in agree -- an attempt to unite the country in agreement behind what happened and then behind a potential response, by laying out the evidence of what happened.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and this --

KING: The question is the potential part. He's getting a lot of advice off the Capitol Hill, the turf you walk.

MATTINGLY: To follow up on that point, I think it's important, one, in terms of the public aspect of this. You've seen similar mechanisms kick into gear behind the scenes on Capitol Hill where you had early on in this process a lot of Democrats in particular skeptical of whether there was actual intelligence, whether the intelligence was good enough.

Over the course of the last four days, you've seen the administration really take a very traditional path of briefings, both classified briefings, public briefings to Republican officials, as well Democrat and Republican. What I've been struck by is even skeptical Democrats that I've spoken to who have seen the classified intelligence have started to pull back a little bit on their concerns.

KING: I hate to interrupt, Phil. I want to take it straight over to the Pentagon here.

JONATHAN HOFFMAN, PENTAGON SPOKESPERSON (ph): (INAUDIBLE) information out to you guys. So what we're going to do is we have Lieutenant General Joseph Guastella, who is the commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command. He's calling us from the combined air operations center Al Udeid, Qatar. He's going to make a brief statement on last night's shoot-down. And at this time he's not going take any questions, but we'll hopefully come back to you guys with some more information later today.

So, general.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Jonathan, can we ask you why no questions?

LT. GENERAL JOSEPH GUASTELLA, COMMANDER OF U.S. AIR FORCES CENTRAL COMMAND: Hello.

Hello, good afternoon.

This is Lieutenant General Joseph Guastella, commander of the U.S. Air Forces' Central Command.

I'm prepared to give a statement, but I won't be answering questions at this time.

A U.S. Navy RQ-4 was flying over the Gulf of Oman in the Strait of Hormuz on a recent surveillance mission in international airspace in the vicinity of recent IRGC maritime attacks when it was shot down by an IRGC surface-to-air missile fired from a location in the vicinity of (INAUDIBLE), Iran. This was an unprovoked attack on the U.S. surveillance asset that had not violated Iranian airspace at any time during its mission.

This attack is an attempt to disrupt our ability to monitor the area following recent threats to international shipping and the free flow of commerce. Iranian reports that this aircraft was shot down over Iran are categorically false. The aircraft was over the Strait of Hormuz and fell into international waters.

At the time of the intercept, the RQ-4 was operating at high altitude, approximately 34 kilometers from the nearest point of land on the Iranian coast. This dangerous and escalatory attack was irresponsible and occurred in the vicinity of established air corridors between Dubai, UAE, and Muscat, Oman, possibly endangering innocent civilians.

Thank you.

(INAUDIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, we'll have this available for download.

KING: You're listening there to Lieutenant General Joseph Guastella. He's the Air Force commander for Central Command in the region, speaking from a U.S. military base in Qatar.

We're waiting to see if any Pentagon officials come back out to add any more information. It does not look like that at the moment. This -- forgive me if this gets a little rough. This is what happens in the unpredictability of these things.

But let's -- we're going to wait. Barbara Starr was in the room. She'll get back to us shortly.

Admiral Kirby, I want to come back to you.

We talked heading into this briefing of how specific would they be about the evidence. You have a lieutenant general on the record --

KIRBY: Right.

KING: Saying this drone was in international space.

KIRBY: Yes.

KING: He laid out the parameters with the map. You can see it here. But we don't have -- and my question is, do we need, because of the mistrust between the two governments, the United States and Iran, because of the skepticism many of the allies have about this stand-off with Iran, and we could have a broader conversation about years of the Trump withdrawal from JCPOA. Do we need more data than that or was this enough?

KIRBY: I, frankly, think they're going to need more. I mean that map is -- it's a -- it's a fabricated map. I mean they put the dot on there. It's not -- they're not showing the actual data analysis. So I think they need to give more.

KING: And I just, again, for viewers who don't know, just think about your GPS in your car, your GPS in an airplane, then multiply it by a thousand because it's military sophisticated Technogym.

KIRBY: Yes. Right.

KING: They have ping data. They could show us a map that clearly proves --

KIRBY: Yes.

KING: That shows us where this drone was every second of the mission.

KIRBY: They could have shown -- yes, they could have shown the flight path a little bit better than this. This is -- this, I don't think, is going to satisfy international curiosity and concern.

I think it was also a mistake not to take questions. I understand what the Pentagon's thinking, hey, we're just laying out the facts. We don't want to get drawn into the politics of this thing. They could have avoided those kinds of questions. But I think they should have taken questions and provided a little bit more context. So I'm disappointed that -- I mean I'm glad that they briefed. I'm disappointed that it wasn't more fulsome.

[12:15:02] KING: And just from that map, I believe this is a Defense Department map that they put up. So I just -- this comes from them, not us. But just, if you're unfamiliar with the region or you just need to be refreshed, just look at how crowded this is.

KIRBY: Yes.

KING: I mean think about this. Number one, even if you took all the military ships out, the -- think about the commercial traffic back and forth, largely oil, not all oil and energy, back and forth.

Then you add the Iranian military. You add the U.S. military. You add other militaries in the neighborhood.

KIRBY: Yes.

KING: Then you add the recent escalation of recent days. It is a remarkable tense time. And the Pentagon doesn't want to take questions. They just want to lay out their case, that this was unprovoked and this drone had every right to be where it was.

From your service, what's it like in that little, narrow space right now?

KIRBY: It's crowded. I mean I -- I -- when -- back when I was a young officer, a long, long time ago, I helped escort Kuwaiti tankers in and out of that strait. Even then it was crowded and dangerous. It's ten times more so now because of the capabilities of militaries all in the region, including Iran, are far more sophisticated than they were before. That they could shoot this down, this drone, at that distance with that accuracy is not insignificant and it is an escalation. So I -- I -- it's a very dangerous time right now.

And I think what worries me, John, is that -- that the president's decision space gets further limited and smaller.

KING: Right.

KIRBY: And some of it's on his own doing and the fact that his -- his own team is not on the same page, but also now the Iranians are closing that decision space and they're pushing in -- him into a corner, and I don't think that's good for anybody.

KING: You have a test of wills.

KIRBY: Yes.

KING: And to that point about the president's options. He's in a meeting as we speak with the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.

CNN's Abby Phillip is live at the White House. Abby, I understand this question, what are you going to do, Mr.

President, has come up?

PHILLIP: One of the reporters got a little bit of a question into the president. Are we going to war with Iran? And the president's answer, as he often does is, you'll soon find out.

So absolutely no details from the president. But he's clearly really stringing this along. He is not trying to tamp down the conversation about war. He's saying, we'll let you know soon.

But we also know that he just had a meeting with his national security team. Vice President Mike Pence also attended that meeting. So the president is continuously getting this information about what is going on with the situation. The question is, when is he going to let everyone know? Is he going to let Capitol Hill know, frankly, if war is in the future for this?

But all he had to say to the reporter in response to that question, that very direct question was, you'll soon find out. And the president is always one to sort of leave it open-ended. And I think he's clearly doing that in this case on a very sensitive topic, but not in any way trying to tamp down any talk of an escalation and tensions with Iran as a result of this situation, John.

KING: Abby Phillip, live at the White House.

Let's go over across the river now live to the Pentagon and Barbara Starr.

Barbara, you were in that briefing. You tried, thank you, to get the Pentagon official to stay and actually answer more questions.

Lieutenant General Guastella there -- I hope I'm not mispronouncing his name, laying out the case that, in his view, and there's no reason to doubt him, that this drone was in international air space, that this was an unprovoked Iranian attack in airspace where that drone had every right to be.

But does the Pentagon feel pressure, Barbara, to give us more, to give us more visible proof of where this drone was?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think that they do, especially if the president were to make a decision to have some kind of military option to respond to this. They are going to want to demonstrate to the world.

Look, they would have the radar track, all the telemetry, if you will, all the electronic signals of where this drone was flying. The general making the case, as Ryan Browne reported a short time ago, that it was 30 kilometers off the coast of Iran, which would have been proof that it was in international airspace.

And he talked a little bit about being in these established air corridors that other gulf nations use. And the shoot-down put a lot of civilians at risk. You were talking about air corridors, maritime corridors of transit. You're talking about cities along the coastal regions of the Persian Gulf.

So, look, the Pentagon not prepared -- making it very clear they're not prepared to answer any questions about this because they know, just across the river, the president, at this hour, is talking and leaving that door open.

What we know, up until now, is that the president has been very reluctant publicly to go down the path of a military option against Iran. But the question on the table today is, did this shoot-down really change the calculation? The Iranians shot down a U.S. asset in international airspace. Thankfully, no pilot onboard. This was a drone. Thankfully it fell apparently into the sea. No one hurt.

But they directly did challenge the United States this time. And the question for the president now is to get some options, which we know he's getting from his military advisers, and decide what, if anything, he wants to do about it, John.

[12:20:01] KING: And, Barbara, let me ask you as a follow-up, he's getting those options at a time anyone following the news in recent days knows the defense secretary, who was already acting, is leaving to be replaced by a new acting defense secretary, who was the secretary of the Army. So there's been some turnover, some say chaos at the top of the Pentagon. But, obviously, the military staff is an established career official staff.

And do -- do, a, do we know anything about, how would the military define proportional response? And, b, does the personnel turnover at the top, and uncertainty at the top, have any impact on the quality and the speed with which the president will get that list of options?

STARR: Well, let's start with that very question at the top. The acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, leaves office at midnight on Sunday. The new acting secretary, Mark Esper, we believe joined them at the White House today. He is within days of taking over. He's an experienced hand. He's been the Army secretary.

But, once again, we have someone stepping onto the international stage here for the Trump administration at a time of military crisis. So we also know that the national security advisor, John Bolton, the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have been very welcoming, shall we say, of the notion of a military option against Iran. It's the president who perhaps has been listening to his military advisers, such as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dunford, who are saying, look, if you want to go against Iran, you have to have a strategy. You have to have a policy and you have to fashion a military force to enact a military goal.

This is the problem all the time. Whether it's North Korea or Venezuela or today it's Iran, what do you want to use military force to accomplish? And I can tell you that very senior military people today in the Pentagon are concerned about this because they don't -- they can't predict what Iran's response would be, what the regime and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps response would be if the U.S. conducted what it thought was a proportional strike to answer back on this drone shoot-down. How would the Iranians react? What would they do? Are U.S. forces in the region well protected enough at this hour if there was to be a military response?

And if you start down the road of military action against Iran and you want to ultimately make them get rid of their nuclear program, there is a very strong view at the highest levels of the U.S. military that you are talking about going down the road of regime change in Iran. That that is what some of the top political appointees of the Trump administration ultimately want, regime change. And the U.S. military will tell you chapter and verse, they have lived through Afghanistan, they've lived through Iraq, Syria, ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, they are very familiar. Regime change comes at a steep human cost. It can take decades. And after decades at war, there is still so much uncertainty in the wars we're in.

The president knows he's headed into a political campaign. He has run on the notion of getting out of wars. We know he does not want to make a large troop commitment overseas. So right now the president has quite an interesting decision to make. Can he feel confident enough to engage in some kind of limited military strike against Iran for the drone shoot-down and not risk a wider confrontation with Tehran?

John.

KING: Barbara Starr, live at the Pentagon. The president says you'll soon find out.

Let's check back in with Fred Pleitgen, who is in Tehran.

Fred, it was just a week or so, ten days ago, maybe a little longer than that, the president of the United States was saying, I wish they'd call, urging the Iranian leadership to pick up the phone and call.

PLEITGEN: Yes.

KING: Now we are in a potential military confrontation with the Pentagon briefer saying, Iran is lying, that this drone was in international airspace and the president of the United States saying, you'll finding out soon what he decides to do about options. How is that going to play in Iran?

PLEITGEN: Well, I think the Iranians, John, have been saying for a while that they don't want this to escalate, but at the same time they're saying they're ready for any sort of escalation. I think there's -- there's a lot of things that are really interesting in that play right now. And I was just listening to Barbara Starr, who obviously laid it out perfectly. And I think one of the things that Barbara said is absolutely correct, is that the U.S., at this point, does not know what's going to happen if they do strike back.

And I can tell you, I've been speaking to commanders of the Revolutionary Guard. I've been speaking to former high-level commanders of the Revolutionary Guard. And the one thing they kept telling me again and again and again is, look, the Americans need to understand that if it does come to a shooting war between Iran and the United States, it would not only be a war between the U.S. and Iranian forces, but it would also involve Iranian proxy forces around the Middle East.

And there's one statement from one former commander that keeps ringing, and that's, he said, the Americans need to understand that next to almost every American military base in the greater Middle Eastern region, there is a pro-Iranian proxy force that could very well then destabilize the situation or endanger U.S. forces in that region. So that's certainly something that needs to be calculated.

[12:25:02] And that's -- at the same time, the Iranians also, today, went to great pains to try and prove their point, to try and say that they believe that this drone was indeed in their airspace. We just saw that map that the Pentagon put up. The Iranians, a couple of hours ago, put out a very similar map that also had one single dot on it as well showing where they said that this drone had landed and where it was shot down. They have the dot, obviously, a little bit further east, over their own airspace. And now they say they want to take all of this to the United Nations and make their own case. So they're probably speaking to their own audience here at home, but at the same time also, of course, trying to drum up support for their side of things.

But I think both sides are pretty clear about the fact that if this does get out of control, there is a war between the U.S. and Iran, it's going to be a very, very messy affair. And that's certainly something that the Iranians have been saying again and again. Javad Zarif said it today. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander said it as well, this is maybe a technologically more inferior -- as far as the military technology is concerned nation than the U.S. has (ph). I'm pretty sure that the Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier strike group, which is in this area, probably has more combat ready jets than the entire Iranian air force, but the Iranians have those ground militia forces that they have. They've shown today that their anti- aircraft systems at least work. And what they always keep saying is they also have this ballistic missile program, which they say has gotten a lot more advanced as well. So those would all be considerations that would have to feed into how the Pentagon or how the U.S. is going to respond to all of this.

The Iranians, for their part, are saying they're ready. And, finally, John, the Iranians essentially are saying, look, the Trump administration is in this situation because of themselves. They're the ones who left the nuclear agreement. And a couple of -- I think it was about a week ago, the prime minister of Japan was here in Tehran and he brought that message from President Trump asking for talks with the Iranian leadership, and the Iranian leadership said absolutely not. We had a deal with the United States, we had a deal with the Obama administration. The U.S. left that deal and now Iran is not willing to speak, despite the fact that these sanctions that have been levied against Iran are very detrimental to this country's economy.

A lot of people have lost their jobs. The civilian population is suffering a great deal. I've been walking the streets of Tehran a lot in the past couple of days. The people have been telling me how difficult it is for them. Despite that, the Iranians say, we are not going to talk to this president because he left the Iran nuclear deal and brought America and brought himself into this situation. KING: Fred Pleitgen, live for us, importantly, and we're very lucky,

in Tehran.

Fred, appreciate that. Come back to us if there's any more response to either the president or the Pentagon.

Let's come back into the room.

We could have, for months and weeks and more, an argument about, you know, pulling out of the JCPOA. Whether the Trump administration increased tensions.

But we are in the here and now and the administration says, whatever the reason, that it has proof Iran blew up those tankers. The administration says, and Iran admits, it shot down that drone.

Whether you're mad at President Trump for pulling out of an agreement doesn't give you the right to blow up tankers and to shoot drones out of the sky.

KIRBY: Right. Right.

KING: So the question is, what now? What now? We've talked in recent days about, there's no circuit breaker any of us can see.

KIRBY: Right.

KING: A middle -- who's a third party that would intervene to calm things down. What about if -- there's a thousand troops on their way. The president announced that in response to the tankers. What is the U.S. military footprint there right now? I assume everybody is on a higher alert now than the high alert they were on just hours ago?

KIRBY: Oh, I have no doubt that they are. Tens of thousands of troops in the region. These extra thousand were really just to support reconnaissance aircraft and enforce protection needs, so they're not really offensive in nature.

But I think the other -- the other thing we should be asking, John, is, what about the Europeans? The Iranians may have overplayed their hand here by going after a sovereign U.S. military aircraft in international airspace. The Europeans were not inclined to want to side with Trump in this economic battle. The Iranians are making it harder now on the Europeans to stay on their side and to try to keep the deal in place.

And I also wonder to the degree to which the Revolutionary Guard is sort of out in front of the civil state government. If you read Zarif's tweet, it's trying to kind of pull it back. He's saying, hey, we're going to go to the U.N., we're going to complain, we're going to -- this is all about economic warfare. I think there's divisions inside Iran that we also need to be careful about in terms of the potential escalation and miscalculation going forward.

KING: But this is a uniquely personal singular decision for the commander in chief who, as we talked a bit earlier, often gets debating advice. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong to have a big mix of opinions in the room. But this one is on him. And so does he decide, this is an opportunity to maybe rebuild those relationships with the Europeans on this issue, to your point, saying, we have proof they shot down our drone. Whatever you think about what I did last week, last month, and last year, we're at a moment of crisis, you need to stand with the United States. Increase sanctions, do something diplomatically or does the president listen, he'll hear it from Lindsey Graham on Capitol Hill, he'll hear from Tom Cotton, he may hear it from his national security adviser, they shot down a drone. We need to take something out to prove -- you know, this is a test of wills and you need to show them you're tough.

[12:29:54] KIRBY: Well, it doesn't have to be either/or. At least I hope it's not.

I do think you're right and I think there's an opening here for the Trump administration to finally maybe get some of the international partners onboard after what Iran has done now in the last week. But it doesn't have to be either/or. Like, you come along with us for more economic and diplomatic pressure