WASHINGTON: It wasn\u2019t quite a Zelensky moment. But mild-mannered Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin still had a couple of tense exchanges with US President Donald Trump on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
In the annual Saint Patrick\u2019s Day visit to the Oval Office, Martin begged to differ with Trump on issues from the Iran war to migration to relations with the prime minister of Britain.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what we want, is a peaceful resolution of conflict. That\u2019s where we come from as a small nation,\u201d Martin told reporters about the Middle East war.<\/p>\n
The 65-year-old Taoiseach was under political pressure at home to talk tough to Trump amid the US-Israeli war on Iran.<\/p>\n
Last year Irish hearts were in mouths as Martin talked trade tensions with Trump just days after the US leader\u2019s infamous White House slanging-match with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.<\/p>\n
Then as now, Martin chose a polite but firm approach to Trump, who spent much of the question-and-answer session berating US allies for rebuffing his calls to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n
Noting the transatlantic tensions after Trump accused NATO of making a \u201cfoolish mistake\u201d by not backing the United States, Martin added: \u201cI\u2019m sure European leaders and the US administration will engage, and hopefully we can get a landing zone.\u201d<\/p>\n
But 79-year-old Trump was not satisfied.<\/p>\n
There was a tense moment as the US leader took a breath, waved for silence from the press, and responded.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean the only thing \u2014 I agree with everything you said \u2014 but we helped with Ukraine, and they don\u2019t help with Iran, and they all acknowledge that Iran can\u2019t have a nuclear weapon,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Trump then unloaded a lengthy list of grievances against both the leaders of Iran \u2014 \u201cthe worst people going back to Hitler\u201d \u2014 and Europe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: It wasn\u2019t quite a Zelensky moment. But mild-mannered Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin still had a couple of tense exchanges with US President Donald Trump on Tuesday. In the annual Saint Patrick\u2019s Day visit to the Oval Office, Martin begged to differ with Trump on issues from the Iran war to migration to relations …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":95278,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95279,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95263\/revisions\/95279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}