Fox analyst Jack Keane on US ceasefire with Iran: “I wouldn't have done what we're doing. ... I think we should take control of the Strait of Hormuz ourselves.”
Keane: “I really think that we lost our leverage by stopping the campaign. I would have preferred to go into negotiations with the war continuing."
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From the August 8, 2026, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom
BILL HEMMER (CO-ANCHOR): Let me ask you this. So there is a proposal to meet in Islamabad on Friday. Right now, based on what you know and what you have just said, should the United States be a party to those talks in 48 hours?
JACK KEANE (FOX NEWS ANALYST): Well, I wouldn't have done what we're doing. I wouldn't have gone to the ceasefire. Because I think we should take control of the Strait of Hormuz ourselves. Here is where we're at. We're there, and we have to deal with where we're there. Listen, the president has said time and time again, we have very strong conditions. The president is not going to take a bad deal from these guys. You know, that's just a fact. There's no way he is going to let these people enrich, and there's no way he's going to let them keep the enrichment that they already have. The plan on the table, Bill, is you let us come in there and take it out of there.
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I am confident the president is not going to make a bad deal here. That's the reality of it. He is the guy that shut down the Obama deal because it was a very, very bad deal. And he knows these Iranians very well, and I'm trusting the fact — I know where he is coming from, that he is not going to sign up to anything like what's in that 10-point plan. That's just impossible.
But I really think that we lost our leverage by stopping the campaign. I would have preferred to go into negotiations with the war continuing because we have leverage over them as the war is continuing. That's kind of Putin's playbook, isn't it? He doesn't want to go to a ceasefire and keeps the war going. So we are where we are. But the president still can get the leverage back very quickly by issuing an ultimatum, you've got two weeks to meet my conditions or else, and we go back to where we were.