that. we have to sit down with the saudis and work something out. sand the saudis want very much for us to protect them, but i say, well, we have to work that was an attack on saudi arabia. and that wasn t an attack on us. but we would certainly help them. they ve been a great ally. they spend $400 billion in our country over the last number of years. $400 billion. that s a million and a half jobs. and they re not ones that unlike some surnt countries where they want terms and conditions. they want to say can we borrow the money at 0% for the next 400 years. no. no saudi arabia pays cash. they ve helped us out from the standpoint of jobs and all of the other things. and they ve actually helped us i would call and i would say, listen, our oil prices, our gasoline is too high. you have to let more go. you know that. i would call the crown prince and i would say, you have to help us out. you have to get some more and
we will have to see. we just simply don t know what he s going to decide. this attack is somewhat different. this is a direct attack on a u.s. asset in international airspace. but as the president said, it wasn t an attack on u.s. troops. this was an unmanned drone collecting intelligence on iran. no u.s. troops involved in this. if it went to that next step, perhaps a different outcome. john. barbara starr live at the pentagon for us. admiral kirby, you have experience in the state department and the pentagon. do you agree the president was trying to create some space for himself. even if you think this is a loose cannon or loose unit or provocative element of the revolutionary guard, which has happened before in history, they still shot a u.s. military drone down so one assumes there will be some response. i ll add lastly i don t expect even if the iranian government right now is trying to figure out what happened. they re not going to raise their
that there s wide disagreement sometimes between his advisers. at a moment like this hours after a drone has been shot out of the sky, that uncertainty and unpredictability can add to the confusion, calculations and miscalculations. 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 find something out. what do we make of i don t mean to trivialize this, but the who s on first aspect of this? the president himself has been the one pumping the brakes about responding to the three previous incidents. administration officials have noted that but have also said that they are drawing the line at striking an american asset. it s interesting, they made the point that the iranians had been very careful up until today. but any attack on an american ship or american citizen would demand a response.
either/or. i think there s an opening here for the trump administration to maybe get some of the international partners onboard after what iran has done in the last week. it doesn t have to be either/or. you come along with us for more economic and diplomatic pressure or we ll conduct a military strike. there are military options that are not provocative, not offensive but demonstrable enough to deter iran. so far they have been unsuccessful but there are other things they haven t done but they could do. over the next week we have brian hook, the special representative to iran from the state department heading to the middle east. he s going to meet with the uae, bahrain and saudi arabia to talk to them about this. then we also have john bolton on sunday going to israel, and he s going to be meeting with his israeli counterpart and his russian counterpart. so we don t see any proactive outreach to the europeans, at least at this point. however, both of these trips were planned before
laying out the case that in his view this was an unprovoked iranian attack in airspace where the drone had every right to be. does the pentagon feel pressure, barbara, to give us more? to give us more visible proof of where this drone was? 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 brown reported a short time ago, that it was 30 kilometers off the coast of iran which would have been proof it was in international airspace. he talked a little bit about being in these established air corridors that other gulf nations use. and the shootdown put a lot of civilians at risk. you are talking about air