Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said the goal of the United States should be the destruction of Iran's economy after early morning U.S. airstrikes hit two Iranian-controlled sites in Syria.
"You tighten all the financial screws on Iran," DeSantis said while giving a speech at The Heritage Foundation, according to the Daily Mail. "You know, our goal should be the destruction of the Iranian economy.
"If you do that, they are not going to be able to fund Hezbollah, Hamas and are not going to be able to help Russia," he said.
During DeSantis' remarks, which his campaign touted as a major foreign policy speech, he attacked President Joe Biden's foreign policy as "rudderless, weak, misguided, and solicitous of America's adversaries."
The Florida governor accused the president of enriching Iran "with sanctions relief that has fueled the Hamas attacks, that has fueled what Russia is doing in Europe."
"Biden has enriched them intentionally and it's had disastrous consequences," he said.
DeSantis also slammed Biden for not doing more to counter China's growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Biden has come under fire from Republican lawmakers in recent days, with Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts telling Newsmax earlier this month that the $6 billion in paused Iranian assets should never be allowed to reach Tehran after the Hamas militant group's deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
"We called on the administration early on to freeze it — that was my colleague [Sen.] Marsha Blackburn [R-Tenn.]," Ricketts said. "And now, there's legislation that is being worked on that we hope to pass in the Senate, and I'm sure we'll get support in the House for it as well, to require the president to freeze it and not give it back."
Currently sitting in a bank in Qatar, the assets were originally supposed to be transferred to Iran in exchange for the release of five American hostages.
The Biden administration earlier this week defended the measures it's taken to block Iran's influence in the region.
"We have never been blind to Iran's destabilizing behaviors and the threats they pose in the region since coming into office," White House spokesman John Kirby said. "That's why we have added additional sanctions regimes — 40 of them since we came into office, 30 in just the last year alone. That's why we bolstered our military presence in the region.
"We are not blind to the fact that they continue to support groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and these militia groups in Iraq and in Syria that have been recently, over the course of the last weekend, attacking some of our facilities and our troops as well as our diplomats," he added.
The Pentagon dispatched two F-16 fighter jets early Friday morning to attack weapons and ammunitions facilities in Syria, which are both used by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.
"These precision self-defense strikes are a response to a series of ongoing and mostly unsuccessful attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-backed militia groups that began on Oct. 17," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement. "These Iranian-backed attacks against U.S. forces are unacceptable and must stop."
At the United Nations on Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said that if Israel's offensive against Hamas does not stop, the United States will "not be spared from this fire."
Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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