Near the end of the NewsNation interview segment below, after he erases any ambiguity and declares the current attacks on Iran “President Trump’s war,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) offered to sum up the situation and deliver a straightforward reason why Trump and the U.S. struck Iran.
Tuberville, who said he had spoken to Trump recently and that, based on that communication was unsurprised by the attacks, put China into Trump’s attack calculus and linked the Iran attacks with the American military action that removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last month.
“It’s about oil,” Tuberville said, cutting through the myriad reasons cited by the administration, including nuclear weapons deterrence and regime change (which Tuberville also cites). “We’re shutting off oil from Venezuela to China. And from Iran to China.”
“If you didn’t know it was coming, you haven’t been paying attention.”@SenTuberville gives his reaction to the U.S. and Israel’s joint operation in Iran. pic.twitter.com/9ApYDyRWaF
— Katie Pavlich Tonight (@KatiePavlichNN) March 3, 2026
The President has been transparent about oil being a major part of the action he took in Venezuela, saying that the South American country “stole our oil” under Maduro and convening American oil executives at the White House to discuss a plan to take control of Venezuelan oil in the aftermath of Maduro’s extraction.
But oil, while always part of any political equation in the Middle East, has not been a major talking point of the Trump administration as it presented its reasons for attacking Iran. Tuberville has little company among Republican lawmakers in talking about the Iran attacks as a tool to hurt China by starving the U.S.’s top economic rival of oil.
Reporting in the New Yorker this week, Susan Glasser compiled the loose list below comprising the “astonishing array of different, even contradictory, rationales for the American military attack on Iran” — and it didn’t mention oil or China.
Glasser wrote that the administration’s reasons included: “outright regime change, assistance to the oppressed peoples of the Islamic Republic, stripping Iran of ‘the ability to project power outside its borders,’ stopping future Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks while exacting revenge for past ones, preëmptive action against an imminent Iranian threat to attack U.S. forces, preëmptive action to block Iran from building ballistic missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland, and preëmptive action to stop the Iranian nuclear program…”