WASHINGTON — President Trump backed away from further military action against Iran and called for renewed diplomacy on Wednesday as the bristling confrontation of the past six days eased in the aftermath of an Iranian missile strike that seemed intended to save face rather than inflict casualties.
“Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world,” Mr. Trump said in a televised statement from the Grand Foyer of the White House, flanked by his vice president, cabinet secretaries and senior military officers in their uniforms. “The United States,” he added, “is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.”
The president seemed as eager as the Iranians to find a way out of a conflict that threatened to spiral out of control into a new full-fledged war in the Middle East. While he excoriated Iran’s “campaign of terror, murder, mayhem” and defended his decision to order a drone strike killing the country’s top security commander, he dropped for now the bombastic threats of escalating force, vowing instead to increase economic sanctions while calling for new negotiations.
His statement came hours after Iran’s government indicated that it had “concluded proportionate measures” avenging the killing of the commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, with the launch of more than ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq that house American troops. The missiles harmed no Americans or Iraqis, a result interpreted by some analysts as a deliberate attempt by Iran to claim it had responded while not provoking Mr. Trump.
But analysts cautioned that even as the two sides edged away from a military clash in the short term, the conflict could very well play out in other ways in the weeks and months to come. Iran has many proxy groups in the Middle East that could stir trouble for American troops or American allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and experts remained wary of a possible Iranian cyberstrike on domestic facilities.
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran made clear that his country still saw its mission over the long run as driving the United States out of the Middle East after the killing of General Suleimani. “Our final answer to his assassination will be to kick all US forces out of the region,” Mr. Rouhani wrote on Twitter.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, likewise suggested on Wednesday that an incremental operation would not be the end of the clash. “What matters is that the presence of America, which is a source of corruption in this region, should come to an end,” he said in a speech to a hall filled with imams and others, who chanted, “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”
The operation against General Suleimani may prove to have consequences beyond the direct relationship with Iran. Outraged that the general was killed after arriving at Baghdad International Airport, Iraq’s Parliament voted to expel the 5,000 American troops from the country. Such a decision would still have to be enacted by the caretaker government, but the Pentagon has begun preparing for the possibility of losing its bases in the country nearly 17 years after the invasion ordered by President George W. Bush.
Lawmakers in both parties welcomed Mr. Trump’s decision to pull back from further military action, but Democrats expressed discontent with briefings provided on Wednesday about the supposedly “imminent” threat of attack cited in justifying the drone strike on General Suleimani. Several Republicans as well as Democrats said the presentations were unpersuasive and raised questions about why Mr. Trump had decided to take out the commander now.
Even though the threat of further conflict appeared to recede for now, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would vote on Thursday on a measure curtailing Mr. Trump’s war-making power by requiring him to halt military action against Iran within 30 days unless Congress votes to approve it. Such a measure has little chance of becoming law, however, given Republican control of the Senate and Mr. Trump’s veto pen.
Mr. Trump’s 10-minute televised statement on Wednesday morning was his most extended effort to explain last week’s drone strike on General Suleimani. Aside from a four-minute statement on Friday morning, he has stuck to Twitter blasts, comments to reporters and a call into Rush Limbaugh’s radio show without making an official speech outlining his thinking.
For the statement, he surrounded himself with his top national security advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser. They stood stoically around the president without commenting.
The administration’s messages have at times been conflicting and confusing. The president was forced to walk back threats to target Iranian cultural sites after his defense secretary made clear that doing so would be a war crime. The American headquarters in Baghdad had drafted a letter indicating it was withdrawing from Iraq, only to have the Defense Department say it was a draft document with no authority.
In his statement, Mr. Trump defended his decision to order the drone strike, calling General Suleimani “the world’s top terrorist” responsible “for some of the absolutely worst atrocities” of recent years.
“In recent days, he was planning new attacks on American targets, but we stopped him,” Mr. Trump said without elaborating or offering evidence. “Suleimani’s hands were drenched in both American and Iranian blood. He should have been terminated long ago.”
But he emphasized that he did not want a wider war despite his efforts to build up American combat capacity. “The fact that we have this great military and equipment, however, does not mean we have to use it,” Mr. Trump said. “We do not want to use it.”
While the president’s critics have traced the current conflict to his decision to withdraw from the nuclear agreement brokered by President Barack Obama and five other powers, Mr. Trump repeated his condemnation of that accord and urged Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China to recognize that it is effectively dead. He called on those countries to join him in negotiating a replacement for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the agreement is officially known, that would go further to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“They must now break away from the remnants of the Iran deal, or J.C.P.O.A., and we must all work together toward making a deal with Iran that makes the world a safer and more peaceful place,” Mr. Trump said.
The call on Europeans to abandon the nuclear agreement may fall on deaf ears. Only a few hours before Mr. Trump spoke, European leaders repeated their commitment to the pact and urged Iran to return to compliance despite punishing American sanctions. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief, both said the deal should be preserved.
Similarly, Mr. Trump in his statement called on NATO, an alliance he has regularly scorned, to take on a larger role in the Middle East, and he spoke by telephone with Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, about the idea. But NATO allies have little interest in following Mr. Trump’s lead and in recent days have been withdrawing troops from Iraq to avoid becoming entangled in the conflict between the United States and Iran.
Still, in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike breathed signs of relief that the two nations seemed to be pulling back from violent confrontation, at least for now.
“I applaud the president for de-escalating the situation and putting us back on the path of diplomacy,” said Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We do not seek conflict, but the United States will not be deterred from protecting American lives and our vital national security interests.”
But Democrats faulted Mr. Trump for stoking that eyeball-to-eyeball face-off in the first place and said that the United States would still reap negative consequences as a result. “I am glad that the road to war may be narrowing,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, “but the damage done to U.S. national security interests is enormous and potentially irreparable.”
General Suleimani, the commander of the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was the architect of Iran’s efforts to extend its influence throughout the Middle East. He helped direct wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen as he sought to establish a regional bloc of Shiite power, and he was held responsible by the United States for attacks on American troops in Iraq that killed at least 600 during the height of the Iraq war.
More recently, American officials pointed to General Suleimani as the force behind a Dec. 27 rocket attack on a base in Iraq that killed an American civilian contractor. They said he had traveled the region in recent days as part of preparations for a future attack that could have killed hundreds of Americans; however, they provided scant details and no evidence.
The Iranian missile strikes, which began early Wednesday morning local time or late Tuesday in Washington, targeted Al Asad Air Base, long a hub for American military operations in Iraq, and another base in Erbil in northern Iraq, which has been a home for Special Operations forces in the fight against the Islamic State both in Iraq and in Syria.
Reporting was contributed by Helene Cooper from Washington, and Steven Erlanger from Brussels.