The second US aircraft carrier will sail to the Middle East

The Pentagon has ordered a second aircraft carrier strike group to prepare to deploy to the Middle East in preparation for a potential attack on Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. However, the final decision on this matter has not been made yet.

According to the newspaper, the order to prepare was given after Trump said on Tuesday in an interview for Axios that he was considering such a move. The order to send an aircraft carrier and an accompanying group of ships to the vicinity of Iran could be made within a few hours.

The ships would join the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which is already in the region and was brought there from the South China Sea.

One of the officials quoted by the newspaper reported that The Pentagon is preparing the ships for deployment in two weeks, probably from the US east coast. The aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush completes a series of exercises off the coast of Virginia. The last time two US aircraft carrier groups were in the region was in March last year, when they were sent there to fight Iran's Yemen allies – the Houthi fighters.

Trump himself said on Wednesday after his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the decision on the use of force had not yet been made and that he preferred a diplomatic solution.

“Nothing was finally agreed except that I insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether an agreement could be finalized or not,” he said.

He stressed that reaching an agreement would be a priority. “If we can't achieve that, we'll have to see what the outcome will be,” Trump stressed.

He wrote that “the last time Iran decided it would be better off not making a deal and got hit by the Midnight Hammer, it didn't work out for them.” He referred in this way to the codename of the operation of the American forces that carried out an attack on Iranian nuclear installations last summer.

“Let's hope that this time they will be more reasonable and responsible,” the president said.

From Washington Oskar Górzyński (PAP)

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