Florida’s Governor continues to flesh out the seemingly unlikely scenario of a Bahamian attack on the United States, saying it wouldn’t take long to make residents of the island archipelago regret it.
Ron DeSantis is telling Iowans that it would, in fact, take just “five minutes” to “flatten” the commonwealth.
“If people were firing rockets from the Bahamas into like Fort Lauderdale, we would never allow that. I mean, we would flatten them. Within like five minutes, we would flatten them,” he said in Eldridge on Sunday.
Despite the need for the U.S. Embassy in Nassau to clarify that his comments don’t reflect American foreign policy, the Governor continues to use this metaphor to draw a parallel between hypothetical attacks on the U.S. from Nassau and the situation in Israel, where the country is approaching its second full month of response to the terror attacks Oct. 7.
“You know, as Governor of Florida, if somebody from the Bahamas was firing rockets into Fort Lauderdale, we would not accept that,” he said in New Hampshire last month. “We would flatten it, like, in no time. We would never accept that happening to our people.”
“Can you imagine just after our 9/11, if three weeks later, people were demanding that we had a cease-fire against al-Qaida and the Taliban? We would never have done that. And I think to myself as Governor of Florida, if we had, if someone in the Bahamas was launching missiles into Fort Lauderdale, we would not accept that for a minute,” DeSantis vowed in a previous Iowa visit. “We would go in and we would flatten them in no time certain.”
The U.S. government responded to the first DeSantis commentary via the Bahamian press.
“The Bahamas and the United States enjoy an enduring and unique partnership. (Chargé D’affaires Usha Pitts) regrets if DeSantis’ comments suggested anything other than a close alliance between our two democratic nations,” the U.S. Embassy said in a statement to The Nassau Guardian.
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