The U.S. government recently released videos they say show Iran's Revolutionary Guard removing an unexploded mine from a tanker that was allegedly attacked in the Gulf of Oman.
President Donald Trump said in an interview with Fox & Friends on Friday, "Iran did do it, and you know they did it because you saw the boat."
But WGBH News analyst Charlie Sennott warned against taking this video and Trump's words as irrefutable evidence, as some U.S. allies are pressing the Trump administration for more concrete evidence linking Iran to the attacks.
"We're right to be very skeptical," Sennott said in an interview with Boston Public Radio Monday. "There are important people who are very very skeptical and wary of the evidence for this, including Japan, which owns one of the ships, these are allies who are saying we don't know if you're really there, on the facts."
While the U.S. and Iran have been adversaries for decades, Sennott drew a throughline to the increased rhetoric from Trump's decision to withdraw from the Obama-era agreement to limit Iran's nuclear program, and lobby other countries to stop doing business with Iran.
"Iran said point blank, if you break the agreement — which is exactly what this admin did — we will return to civilian side of the nuclear program," said Sennott. "They said they would do it, and now they are doing it. It is a real problem when Iran looks like a rational actor in comparison to Washington, that's how it feels. We are so erratic in our foreign policy right now. ... We can't let partisan politics impact complex diplomacy that made the world safer, just because the Trump administration wants to make the Obama administration look bad and call everything they tried to do the worst deal of the century."
On Monday, Iran said it would boost its stockpile of enriched uranium to exceed limits set by the Obama-era deal.
Charles Sennott heads up The GroundTruth Project and is a WGBH 'News Analyst.'