from further restrictions on the supply of oil. so you re right that that is a very precarious idea. but as michael says, it is the one thing perhaps that gets attention. so puts the president an awkward position where he has d to make a decision on something that may be against his own political interest at home in order to decide what may be the best strategic decision overseas. we will see how they receive at this point but that is obviously a tough calculation. with 201 days to go before the election, extraordinarily tough. peter, what else can you tell us about the conversation? the situation within the biden administration, between israel s attack over the weekend , excuse me, between the israel attack tonight and iran s attack over the weekend, what o is going on inside this white house? yeah, we don t know for sure because they are not talking e right now, so we have got to be careful about assuming but i think emily basically alluded to this earlier, too. in the situation
who else gets involved in this conflagration? again, the u.s. says it will come to israel s help in an offense of operation but if i ran a tax israel, committed helping defense. so this is clearly drawing the united states into something it wants no part of. andrea, thank you so much for joining us tonight. andrea mitchell. let s bring in our panel this evening, peter baker joins us. retired four-star u.s. army general, harry mccaffrey, a decorated combat veteran of vietnam and a former battlefield commander in the persian gulf. michael allen joins us, former special assistant to the president at the national security council peter, president biden urged israel not to escalate andrea just laid it out for us, what do you think the reaction is in the white house tonight?
directly. how concerning is this to see? please hugely concerning. it is something that president biden urged prime minister netanyahu on sunday not to. what he said, actually, saturday night, i guess, it is not:00, that conversation. he said that they should take the win, declare victory, they deterred the attack and even earlier today, the cia director was at the bush farm in texas saying a spectacular failure, the iranian attack. all the messaging from the u.s. had been, iran failed, very few of the missiles ever penetrated israeli airspace. the air defense was spectacular, and the words of one of the officials but tonight, a source tells me that indeed, the me strike has taken place that the
the israelis would give them some sort of a heads up today we just don t know exactly the level of detail that they provided at this point, lawrence. edquickly , running out of times here, what is the united states hoping for from israel on this one? or is it, there is a ds here, whether they say it publicly or whether it is something that they signal th privately to the iranians, we are not looking to escalate this further, this doesn t end the conflict, the proxy conflict between israel and iran but this kind of exchange of direct fire, this is over. one of the main u.s. interest since october 7th has been avoiding an all out war between israel and iran or even an escalation of the war that is in gaza to places like lebanon, kind of full-scale point i think that will continue to be the focus of the biden administration tomorrow is just trying to contain this. so that it doesn t continue to u
that is the large question at this point, stephanie. if, indeed, this was an attack by israel inside iran, what will the iranians do next? national security officials here at the white house will be watching very closely, and again, this comes just days t after president biden told prime minister netanyahu to take the wheel because there were no casualties in that attack by iran on israel. now, though, it appears that israel has retaliated. the white house has consistently said that it does not want this to escalate into a wider war. the u.s. pulled together a coalition to shoot iran s missile down last week. is there concern in the white rn house tonight that we now could be pulled into what could be a much wider conflict? certainly, that is a big concern. that national security n officials here have been looking at. but we are told that when president biden had that conversation with prime minister netanyahu several days ago, he said that the united states would not be involved i