MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin — Rich Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Tuesday morning that President Donald Trump could remove the Houthis in Yemen as a threat on taking office.
Goldberg, an expert on Iran, spoke on a panel discussion hosted near the Republican National Convention by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), a nonpartisan organization representing the mainstream of the Jewish community in the United States.
He described the failure of the Biden administration to deter Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons program and arming terrorist allies throughout the Middle East. Goldberg pointed out that Iran had stopped enriching uranium after President Donald Trump had eliminated Iranian terror general Qasem Soleimani (which then-candidate Biden opposed), and that it resumed its enrichment activity when Biden took office, in January 2021.
He described the ability to deter Iran as a function of “capacity” and will,” saying that both Biden and Trump had capacity, but only Trump had will.
While it would be difficult, he said, to put the “genie” of Iranian enrichment “back in the bottle,” the same tools Trump used in his first term would still work, namely sanctions and military pressure where necessary.
Goldberg said that Trump could weaken Iran by taking out the Houthi rebels, who are armed and backed by Iran, and who were held in check by Saudi Arabia with support from the Trump administration until Biden took office.
The Houthis have attacked international shipping through the Red Sea, and project a threat to the U.S. Navy in Djibouti across the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. The Biden administration has struck a defensive posture in response, using expensive missile defense systems to strike down Houthi missiles, and occasionally attacking the points of launch, but refusing to use the massive firepower of the U.S. military to take out the Houthi threat.
On the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Goldberg said that he was skeptical that Trump would emphasize it, adding that unless Iran, the “head of the octopus,” was prevented from fueling Palestinian terror, no peace agreement was likely to be reached.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
