WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump toughened his rhetoric toward Iran on Tuesday, saying the country would “be held fully responsible” for the attack by Iraqi demonstrators on the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad, an assault that Mr. Trump said was directed by Tehran.
The growing crisis raised unexpected new questions about the Trump administration’s relationship with Iraq, and it strained Mr. Trump’s aversion to a military clash with Iran as well as any deeper entanglements in the Middle East. Mr. Trump faced pressure from hawkish allies in Washington to go further, while memories of the deadly attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, loomed over the administration.
“To those many millions of people in Iraq who want freedom and who don’t want to be dominated and controlled by Iran, this is your time!” Mr. Trump implored on Twitter as demonstrators set up camp at the gates of the American Embassy in Baghdad.
The siege on the embassy created an unwelcome holiday disruption for Mr. Trump, who has spent the past week out of sight, splitting time between his Mar-a-Lago resort estate in Florida and his luxury golf club a few miles away. Mr. Trump has not spoken to reporters since Christmas Eve and was absent from a Sunday evening news briefing at Mar-a-Lago during which three of his top national security officials discussed American airstrikes against an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia.
But on Tuesday he interrupted his holiday routine, leaving his golf club hours earlier than usual and noting on Twitter that he had held a meeting there on “the Middle East, the Military, and Trade.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Trump issued a stern warning to Tehran. “Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq,” he tweeted. “They will be held fully responsible.”
No Americans were harmed in the assault on the compound, and the attackers did not enter any embassy buildings. But the Trump administration was treating the threat as a new escalation by Iran, two days after Mr. Trump approved the airstrikes against the militia group that American officials said was responsible for a recent rocket attack on an Iraqi military base that killed an American contractor and wounded four American soldiers.
Trump administration officials, particularly Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have long spoken about the need to “restore deterrence” against Iran to check its military activities throughout the Middle East. They blame President Barack Obama for emboldening Tehran through the 2015 nuclear deal.
But even some of Mr. Trump’s traditional conservative allies fear that a president who has repeatedly called for winding down “endless wars” has effectively condoned Iranian behavior with his clear aversion to using military force. In mid-June, Mr. Trump ordered limited airstrikes to punish Iran for shooting down an expensive American drone near its coastline, only to call off the attack at the last minute. Mr. Trump also defied calls from some Republican supporters to strike at Iran after it attacked a major Saudi oil production facility in September, although Mr. Trump has dispatched thousands of American troops to help Saudi Arabia defend itself.
Mr. Trump has also repeatedly said he would like to negotiate a new agreement with Iran’s leaders to replace Mr. Obama’s nuclear pact, and would welcome a grand deal as something he can point to in his re-election campaign. But Iran has refused to discuss its nuclear program and other issues until Mr. Trump rolls back economic sanctions on the Islamic republic, including sharp limits on its oil exports, a step the president has refused to take.
Mr. Trump was cheered on by some hawkish Republican allies on Tuesday, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a longtime advocate of confrontation with Iran who golfed with the president in Florida on Tuesday.
Mr. Graham praised Mr. Trump on Twitter for “acting decisively” and told Iran that the president “will hold you accountable for threats against Americans and hit you where it hurts the most.” He also issued what appeared to be a veiled threat of further military action, telling the Iranian government that “a country that depends on the ability to refine oil for its existence needs to be cautious.”
Echoing Mr. Graham was Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, who said in a statement on Tuesday that Iran had committed “yet another reckless escalation” and “must be held responsible.”
Complicating the picture was what a senior Trump administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity on Monday, cast as longtime frustration with the Iraqi government, which has not taken more action to protect American military and diplomatic personnel from threats by Iranian-backed militia groups. Thousands of American troops and civilians remain in Iraq nearly a decade after the United States officially ended its occupation of the country.
Mr. Trump tweeted on Tuesday that “we expect Iraq to use its forces to protect the Embassy, and so notified!” Senators from both parties echoed that view on Tuesday, even as much of Iraq’s political establishment bitterly complained about the American airstrikes within its borders this week.
Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, warned in a tweet against conflating the embassy attack with mass protests that have gripped Iraq in recent months.
“The attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad is straight from Iran’s playbook in 1979,” Mr. Bolton wrote. “It’s a sign of Iranian control over Shia militia groups, not a sign of Iraqi anti-Americanism. We must protect our citizens from Iranian belligerence.”
Some foreign policy analysts said the fast-moving crisis pointed to muddled thinking within the Trump administration about its approach toward Iran, against which Mr. Trump has pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign of severe economic sanctions since he withdrew from the nuclear deal in mid-2018.
“Trump, who would just as soon withdraw wholesale from Iraq, faces a conundrum in an election year: How to avoid looking weak on the one hand and yet avoid triggering a messy conflict with Iran and deeper involvement in Iraq on the other that will alienate his base and energize his opponents,” said Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official and Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Mr. Trump’s public pledges to disentangle the United States from wars in the Middle East are more complicated and problematic than they appear, former officials and analysts said. While the president has talked incessantly about withdrawing American troops and has been reluctant to order military strikes, he has actually added troops in some areas, most notably about 3,000 to Saudi Arabia in an order issued in October. The key factor there was Saudi Arabia’s willingness to pay the costs of maintaining the troops, a persistent issue with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump has also signaled a strong distaste for engagement in foreign conflicts in neighboring Syria. He surprised top advisers by withdrawing American troops from the Syria-Turkey border in October and allowing Turkey to invade a Kurdish-held area in Syria. Mr. Trump eventually agreed to keep some troops by oil fields in Syria after senior Defense Department officials stressed to Mr. Trump that the soldiers would be securing oil.
Mr. Trump has persistently clashed with his top foreign policy aides at the State Department, the Pentagon and the National Security Council over American objectives in Iran, Syria and Iraq. Both Mr. Bolton and James F. Jeffrey, the State Department’s special representative on Syria, said in the fall of 2018 that the United States would remain engaged in Syria until Iran had left the country, a goal that clashed with Mr. Trump’s desires.
The president announced in December 2018 that he planned to withdraw troops from Syria, prompting the resignations of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a veteran Marine general, and Brett H. McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the international coalition battling the Islamic State.
On Tuesday morning, the State Department said Mr. Pompeo had spoken with Iraq’s prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, and president, Barham Salih, in separate calls. A brief summary of the calls released by the department said Mr. Pompeo “made clear the United States will protect and defend its people, who are there to support a sovereign and independent Iraq.”
The summary also said the two Iraqi leaders “assured the secretary that they took seriously their responsibility for and would guarantee the safety and security of U.S. personnel and property.”
The department said on Monday night, before the attack on the embassy, that Mr. Pompeo had held separate calls on the recent American military strikes with three leaders in the Middle East who are considered partners by the Trump administration — Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
The safety of embassy employees is a particularly fraught issue for Mr. Pompeo. He became a political star among Republicans for delivering blistering criticism of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when he was a member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which investigated the decisions she made around the 2012 attack on the diplomatic compound in Libya. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens; another full-time government employee, Sean Smith; and two American C.I.A. contractors died in that attack.
Former State Department officials and associates of Mr. Pompeo say because of that history and the ensuing harm to Mrs. Clinton’s political career, he is keen to ensure that American diplomats overseas are not in potentially harmful situations. Republican politicians in Washington say that Mr. Pompeo, a Trump loyalist, might run for an open Senate seat in Kansas in 2020 and then president in 2024. Fatalities or serious harm to diplomats on his watch could result in especially pointed attacks by political opponents.
In May, during a period of heightened tensions with Iran, Mr. Pompeo ordered most non-Iraqi employees of the embassy in Baghdad and the consulate in Erbil, in northern Iraq, to leave the country. Employee numbers at the embassy are still much lower than they were before that order, American officials say.
In response to the turmoil engulfing the American Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday, the American military conducted a show of force with helicopter gunships and deployed about 120 Marines to reinforce the compound’s grounds, a Pentagon official said. In 2014, around the same number of Marines were deployed to the embassy as the Islamic State threatened to enter the city during ISIS’ sweep across northern Iraq.
Michael Crowley reported from West Palm Beach, and Edward Wong from Washington. Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting from Washington.