Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that the United States is prepared to level ‘the strongest sanctions in history’ on Iran if the Islamic nation’s government does not reverse course on its nuclear ambitions.
America’s goal is to ‘strangle’ Iran’s ‘economic capacity to do harm,’ he said, but President Donald Trump is willing to call off the dogs if the rogue nation turns over a new leaf on its own.
‘We will apply unprecedented financial pressure on the Iranian regime. The leaders in Tehran will have no doubt about our seriousness,’ Pompeo said. ‘The sting of sanctions will be painful if the regime doesn’t change.’
‘These will indeed end up being the strongest sanctions in history when we are complete,’ he warned.
Pompeo outlined the rough contours of an uncompromising agreement that he said would allow Tehran to escape an economic chokehold that began to loosen with the adoption of an Obama-era deal that Trump withdrew from on May 8.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened ‘the strongest sanctions in history’ on Monday, to ‘strangle’ Iran’s terror-funding capacity, if Tehran doesn’t end its nuke program permanently
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei presides over a regime that the Trump administration credits with outmaneuvering Barack Obama and John Kerry, getting the best of a 2015 deal that allowed Tehran to press ‘pause’ on its nuclear weapons program while changing nothing of significance
Pompeo said the administration’s preference would be to negotiate a binding treaty that would be submitted to Congress for ratification.
But getting there, he warned, would require Iran’s mullahs to walk away from a long list of activities that the U.S. considers deal-breakers.
‘We didn’t create the list. They did,’ Pompeo declared, after rattling off a collection of demands.
He promised that resistance from Iran ‘will be met with steely resolve’ from Trump.
Central to the U.S. wish-list is the requirement that Iran must disclose everything about its nuclear weapons development program to the International Atomic Energy Agency ‘and permanently and verifiably abandon it in perpetuity.’
The IAEA, he said, must have ‘unqualified access to all sites throughout the country.’
The 2015 multinational deal allowed Tehran to press ‘pause’ on its development, resuming it a decade later. It also placed scant restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program and did little to address its support for terrorism in the region.
Trump called it a ‘horrible, one-sided deal’ with a built-in sunset date.
Pompeo’s demands, by comparison, are permanent.
Included in his prohibitions are enrichment of uranium, ‘reprocessing’ of plutonium from fuel rods, and produciton of heavy water.
Pompeo’s 12-point list of ‘basic requirements’ also includes the release of U.S. citizens; and end to ballistic missile proliferation; cancelation of all support for Hizbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad; and an end to cooperation with Houthi militias in Yemen.
He also conditioned the avoidance of future sanctions on Iran’s willingness to end its support for the Taliban, cease harboring senior al-Qaeda leaders and end its persistent threats to destroy Israel.
Pompeo singled out Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani (left), commander of the Quds Force within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a target of sanctions, saying the U.S. aimed to ‘strangle’ his ability to threaten Israel and cause havoc in the region
Pompeo described previous U.S. and international sanctions relief as a boon to Iranian Quds Forces commander Qasem Soleimani, allowing him to fund ‘malign activities’ that destabilize the Middle East.
And he said the U.S. is prepared to end all economic sanctions, reestablish diplomatic relations and support the modernization of Iran’s economy – but only if the oil- and terror-rich nation changes course dramatically.
France, Germany and the United Kingdom are attempting to keep the Obama nuclear deal alive without the United States’ involvement, largely because of the economic advantage of leaving Iran open for investment and commerce.
The secretary of state said that U.S. firms, too, were chomping at the bit for access to the ‘huge market.’
‘But everyone’s going to have to participate in this,’ he said, tut-tutting Europe. ‘Every country’s going to have to understand that we cannot continue to create wealth for Qasem Soleimani.’
‘That’s what this is – at the end of the day, this money has flowed to him. The economics have permitted them to run roughshod over the Middle East. Our effort is to strangle his economic capacity to do harm to the Middle East and to the world.’