WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Wednesday he doesn’t want to carry out a U.S. strike on Iran but suggested he stands ready to act if it’s necessary to extinguish Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump continued his increasingly pointed warnings about the U.S. joining Israel in striking at Tehran’s nuclear program as Iran’s leader warned anew that the United States would be greeted with stiff retaliation if it attacks.

The stakes are high for Trump — and the world — as he engages in a push-pull debate between his goals of avoiding dragging the U.S. into another war and preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“I’m not looking to fight,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “But if it’s a choice between fighting and having a nuclear weapon, you have to do what you have to do.”

Trump pondered his next steps as the U.S. embassy in Israel began evacuating a number of diplomats and family members who had asked to leave Israel.

Meanwhile, senior European diplomats are set to hold talks with Iran in Geneva on Friday, according to a European official familiar with the matter.

The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and requested anonymity, said the high-ranking diplomats from Germany, France and the United Kingdom as well as the European Union’s top diplomat will take part in the talks.

Trump, who met with his national security aides for a second straight day in the White House Situation Room, also told reporters it’s not “too late” for Iran to give up its nuclear program.

“I may do it, I may not do it,” Trump said of a potential U.S. strike. “I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

“Nothing is finished until it is finished,” he added, signaling a decision could soon. “The next week is going to be very big — maybe less than a week.”

No surrender from Iran

Trump also offered a terse response to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s refusal to heed to his call for Iran to submit to an unconditional surrender.

“I say good luck,” Trump said.

Khamenei earlier in the day warned that any U.S. strikes targeting the Islamic Republic will “result in irreparable damage for them” and that his country would not bow to Trump’s call for surrender.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers that the Pentagon was providing possible options to Trump as he decides next steps on Iran.

Trump had said Tuesday the U.S. knows where Khamenei is hiding but doesn’t want him killed — “for now.”

“He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump said.

Trump’s increasingly muscular comments toward the Iranian government follow him urging Tehran’s 9.5 million residents to flee for their lives as he cut short his participation in an international summit earlier this week to return to Washington for urgent talks with his national security team.

Trump said that the Iranian officials continue to reach out to the White House as they’re “getting the hell beaten out of them” by Israel. But he added there’s a “big difference between now and a week ago” in Tehran’s negotiating position.

“They’ve suggested that they come to the White House — that’s, you know, courageous,” Trump said.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations rejected Trump’s claim in a statement on social media. “No Iranian official has ever asked to grovel at the gates of the White House. The only thing more despicable than his lies is his cowardly threat to ‘take out’ Iran’s Supreme Leader. ”

Enter Putin

The U.S. president said earlier this week Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to serve as a mediator with Iran. But Trump said he told Putin to keep focused on finding an endgame to his own conflict with Ukraine.

“I said, ‘Do me a favor, mediate your own,’” Trump said he told Putin. “I said, ‘Vladimir, let’s mediate Russia first. You can worry about this later.’”

The comments represented a shift for Trump, who earlier this week said he was “open” to Putin’s offer to mediate.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said earlier Wednesday that Moscow has cautioned Washington against offering direct military assistance to Israel.

“We are warning Washington against even speculative, hypothetical considerations of the sort,” Ryabkov said, according to the Interfax news agency. “That would be a step drastically destabilizing the situation as a whole.”

The Russia-Iran relationship has deepened since Putin launched a war on Ukraine in February 2022, with Tehran providing Moscow with drones, ballistic missiles, and other support, according to U.S. intelligence findings.

MAGA allies raise questions

Trump is also facing growing skepticism about deepening U.S. involvement in the Mideast crisis from some of his most ardent supporters. Trump during his 2024 run for the White House promised voters he would quickly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and keep the U.S. out of costly conflicts.

Steve Bannon, who served as a senior adviser to Trump during his first administration, said the administration should tread carefully.

“This is one of the most ancient civilizations in the world, ok?” Bannon told reporters at an event sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “With 92 million people. This is not something you play around with. You have to think this through. And the American people have to be on board. You can’t just dump it on them.”

Bannon and other Trump allies, including Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and conservative pundit Tucker Carlsonhave raised concerns that direct U.S. involvement in the conflict could be seen as a betrayal to some members of Trump’s coalition and cause a schism in MAGA world.

To be certain, some Trump backers are supportive of the president taking military action against Iran and play down the risk of the U.S. getting mired in a conflict.

“In terms of U.S. involvement in military action, there is zero possibility of American boots on the ground in Iran,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said.

Trump pushed back at the notion that deepening U.S. involvement could impact his standing with his base.

“My supporters are more in love with me today, and I’m in love with them more than they were even at election time when we had a total landslide,” Trump said.

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Associated Press writers Matt Brown, Tara Copp, David Klepper, Matthew Lee, Chris Megerian and Darlene Superville contributed reporting.

Talk show host Tucker Carlson skewered Sen. Ted Cruz, R.-Texas, in what could be considered a minute-and-a-half version of the meme “The worst person you know just made a great point.”

In a segment of his show released Tuesday, Carlson bombarded Cruz with questions related to his support for regime change in Iran as the U.S. supports Israel’s war on Iran. And Carlson was effective — despite being motivated by right-wing isolationist ideas rather than progressive anti-war sentiment.

It is important to know basic demographic facts about a state one is calling for subverting.

“How many people live in Iran, by the way?” Carlson asks at the start of the clip.

“I don’t know the population,” Cruz replies.

“At all?” Carlson asks.

“No, I don’t know the population,” Cruz says.

“You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?” Carlson presses.

After Carlson tells Cruz that Iran has about 90 million people, he asks, “How could you not know that?”

Cruz retorts that he doesn’t “sit around memorizing population tables.”

Carlson insists it’s relevant because Cruz is calling for the overthrow of the government. He then quizzes Cruz about the ethnic makeup of Iran, and eventually Cruz erupts in exasperation, saying, “This is cute,” and defending himself by saying, “OK, I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran.”

Some might say Carlson pounced on Cruz with gotcha questions. But it is important to know basic demographic facts about a state one is calling for subverting through brutal bombardment and potentially other kinds of attacks.

From a strictly strategic perspective, it is crucial to have an understanding of the population of a country that would — assuming regime change efforts are successful — experience a period of mass instability and displacement in a region of acute geopolitical interest to the U.S. Consider, for example, how the U.S.’s naivete about ethnic sectarianism in Iraq played a role in dooming its imperialistic nation-building efforts there and created fertile soil for the emergence of ISIS. And it makes sense for Carlson to point out that Iran is not a small country. It should affect how the American public perceives what kind of war it could be getting into, and what Iran’s capacity to retaliate against Israel in the long term might be.

But it’s just as important on a moral, humanistic level to have a basic familiarity with a population one is proposing to wreak havoc on through the use of force. Despite what the hawks might want the U.S. public to believe, Iran is not a bunker filled with cartoon villains. It’s a vast country with a rich cultural, political and social history. It’s a country filled with tens of millions of people, the vast majority of whom are just trying to live their lives like in any other country in the world. And acknowledging the texture of that reality makes it harder to propose taking a wrecking ball to it.

Despite what the hawks might want the U.S. public to believe, Iran is not a bunker filled with cartoon villains.

Distaste for facts or realistic appraisals of threats is integral to the case for war. Cruz has recently called Iran getting a nuclear weapon “the most acute threat the United States faces today,” which is utter nonsense. Iran is an economically struggling regional power in the Middle East that doesn’t have nuclear weapons; it is far less of a threat to the U.S. than Russia and China, or North Korea, which has nuclear weapons and some demonstrable ability to send them far distances.

Despite Cruz’s a manmonueing about the prospect of a “mushroom cloud over New York City or Los Angeles,” the U.S. has many other more realistic threats to worry about. And neither Cruz nor any of his war-hungry colleagues have explained why Iran wouldn’t theoretically be deterred from using nuclear weapons by the same principle that has long prevented nuclear warfare around the world: mutually assured destruction.

Throughout the rest of the interview clip, Carlson pushes Cruz to clarify how dangerous Iran actually is and what the exact scope of the U.S.’s involvement in Israel’s operations are. And he does it with a kind of doggedness often absent from mainstream reporters when they interrogate American politicians about war.

Carlson’s positions don’t come from a humanitarian perspective or a principled defense of sovereignty — consider how soft he is on Russia as it dominates Ukraine. Rather, his ideological case against foreign involvement comes from a right-wing nationalist preference for withdrawal from the world and a skepticism of interventionism that is at least partially rooted in bigotry in some instances. (Carlson has said Iraq “wasn’t worth invading” because it’s filled with “semiliterate primitive monkeys.”)

Ultimately, Carlson’s skepticism of involvement in Iran aligns with where much of the Republican base appears to be at the moment. According to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted between June 13 and June 16, only 23% of Republicans think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Iran and Israel. We will see if Carlson and his faction prevail in the war of ideas — and policy — in the coming weeks.

Zeeshan aleem

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.

Brittany Charlton, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and renowned expert in LGBTQ health, has described the goal of her research as “trying to improve health care for a segment of the population that had been largely ignored despite a greater-than-average rate of poor outcomes.”

That’s a succinct description of health disparities research. Addressing disparities entails figuring out why there’s a failure in health or health care somewhere and how to fix it. Such failures can depend on how old you are, how wealthy, if you have a disability, how much access you have to a healthy diet, and so on. And some occur among particular racial or ethnic groups and among those who are sexual and gender minorities.

Addressing disparities entails figuring out why there’s a failure in health or health care and how to fix it.

But the National Institutes of Health terminated research related to those latter groups, including Charlton’s, stating that President Donald Trump’s NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, found such work “not scientifically valuable.”

“This represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s L.G.B.T.Q. community. That’s what this is,” U.S. District Judge William Young wrote in his ruling against the NIH this week. In response to a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Public Health Association and several other organizations filed against the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services and their directors, Young found that the NIH violated federal law by withdrawing funding from thousands of active NIH research grants. Many grants were related to research on sexual and gender minority health, and programs to enhance the diversity of the research workforce.

Contrary to Bhattacharya’s assertion, the research projects NIH canceled had already been deemed scientifically valuable by an independent panel of experts charged with determining if the research will have a significant impact on health, if it is scientifically rigorous, and if the study can be conducted as proposed by the qualified research team. That process of review is intensive, as I’ve previously explained. Even grants for trainee scientists are held to an extremely high standard.

Further, it is beyond ignorance to think that such research is harmful or, as the government claimed, discriminatory. Studying health disparities isn’t about promoting one group over another. Figuring out when, and for whom, things aren’t working and figuring out ways to fix what isn’t working is part of the routine process of understanding all health and health-related interventions, and making them work better, more comprehensively and yes, DOGE, more efficiently. That’s why the work of evaluating and reducing health disparities is still written into the strategic priorities of the NIH director. Sometimes the study of differences reveals deep, entrenched, systematic disadvantages experienced by one group or another. These are health inequities, and they are challenging and critical to acknowledge and address because the failure here goes well beyond the design of an individual intervention.

One of my own research projects studied an ambitious Oregon Medicaid policy to improve the care of back pain, emphasizing nonpharmacological treatments such as physical therapy and massage over opioids, which had been shown to have little benefit and potential harm. Our team found that while many Oregonians on Medicaid shifted their care to nonpharmacologic modalities, Black, American Indian/Alaska Native and Hispanic enrollees did so less often.

It’s not discrimination for us to try to find out why the policy didn’t work for everyone and to try to figure out the barriers that kept some people from accessing safe and evidence-based care. These questions are the subject of our current study. Our hope is that the next time such a policy is enacted, it will have a greater impact in reducing pain and improving health outcomes across all populations.

A 1992 commentary in the Hastings Center Report called attention to the history of exclusion in medical research with the biting headline “Wanted: Single, White Male for Medical Research.” It called out the discrimination that left many out of the benefits of scientific progress. It was in recognition of that regrettable history that the Office of Minority Health and the Office of Research on Women’s Health were established in 1986 and 1990 respectively. But evidence suggests we continue to have a great deal of work to course-correct.

A 1992 commentary called attention to the history of exclusion in medical research with the biting headline “Wanted: Single, White Male for Medical Research.”

It’s right to be concerned for groups experiencing poor health outcomes. That should be enough to support the kind of research the NIH is systematically slashing. But the lowest common denominator reason to support disparities research is a selfish one: figuring them out helps whole lines of science that benefit us all. Someone on an airline flight in seat 5D would never argue that an air leak next to 10A doesn’t matter to them.

Earlier this month, NIH employees issued an open letter — a rare move for civil servants — rebuking Bhattacharya for these and other actions, urging him to “restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue.” Now a court has also ruled against slashing the grants.

Meanwhile, scientists across the country simply want to return to their health-promoting, lifesaving work. In ordinary times, no one would stand in their way.

Dr. Esther Choo

Esther Choo, M.D. M.P.H., is an emergency medicine physician, health policy researcher and founding member of Equity Quotient, a company that advises organizations on building cultures of equity. She has provided commentary on the pandemic and other health care topics through appearances on BLN, BLN, the BBC and Yahoo! Finance and editorials published in The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, The Washington Post, NBC Think and USA Today.