WASHINGTON(National Times)- President Donald Trump on Thursday drew a parallel between US strikes on Iran and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor decades ago, as he defended the war against Tehran at a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Washington. “We wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t ⁠you tell me about Pearl Harbor?” Trump said when a journalist asked why he had not told allies about his war plans. “You believe in surprise, I think much more so than us.”

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Takaichi’s eyes widened and she shifted in her chair as Trump, seated beside her in the Oval Office, evoked the moment that ⁠drew the US into World War Two. The Japanese attack on the US naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Dec 7, 1941, killed 2,390 Americans, and the US declared ⁠war on Japan the next day. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it “a date which will live in infamy.” The US defeated ⁠Japan in August 1945, days after US atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of ⁠thousands of civilians.