President Donald Trump‘s speech at the Davos Economic Forum on Wednesday focused primarily on Greenland and his desire to acquire the island, while he barely mentioned the current tension with Iran.
The only president’s mentions of Tehran during his more than an hourlong address were referencing last year’s U.S. military strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, but he didn’t reference the tension surrounding the regime’s crackdown on protesters in recent weeks, which included security forces killing thousands of protesters, though an exact tally of casualties is unknown.
Previously, Trump had warned that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” but ultimately said that Iran’s apparent willingness to halt roughly 800 executions last week had a “big impact” on his decision not to approve military action in Iran.
“It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran,” Trump told Politico on Jan. 17, and days later, he added, “We’re just going to have to see what happens with Iran. There’s a military option.”
Even as the crackdowns in Iran seemingly dissipate, the U.S. military is bolstering its presence in the Middle East.
A dozen F-15Es assigned to the 494th Fighter Squadron at Royal Air Force Base Lakenheath, U.K., departed over the weekend, headed toward the Middle East, according to Air and Space Magazine, while the department has also dispatched an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, to the region from the Pacific.
“The F-15’s presence enhances combat readiness and promotes regional security and stability,” CENTCOM said in a social media post on Tuesday.
Both the U.S. and Iranian officials have also exchanged threats over the possibility of U.S. involvement.
“Unlike the restraint Iran showed in June 2025, our powerful armed forces have no qualms about firing back with everything we have if we come under renewed attack,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, referring to the June 2025 U.S. strikes on its nuclear facilities.
Iranian state television also recently displayed a photo from Trump’s 2024 assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, with the caption, “This time it will not miss the target.”
Referencing Iranian plots to assassinate him and those involved in the 2020 U.S. strike killing Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Trump warned in an interview this week that a successful attack on his life would result in a U.S. retaliation that would “wipe them off the face of this Earth.”
The U.S. has also reduced its presence at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest U.S. military base in the region, due to concerns it could be attacked during an Iranian operation. The base, which has about 10,000 troops, came under attack by Iran following the U.S. strikes on Iran last June.
“We did our job. If we didn’t do that, you would have never had peace in the Middle East. And the countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar could never have — and others could never have signed anything because you would have had this dark cloud, and the dark cloud was Iran with nuclear,” Trump said during his Davos address. “Iran would have — if we didn’t take them out, they would have had a nuclear weapon within two months. They were very close to having the nuclear weapon, and we hit them hard.”
His limited comments about the current tension between the U.S. and Iran could be another instance of the president trying to lull Iranian leaders into a false sense of security, as he did ahead of the attacks last year.