Saudi Arabia is still vulnerable to attacks like the recent strike against a pair of oil facilities, an Iranian official warned after rebuffing any negotiations with the United States.
“The security of Saudi Arabia shall be guaranteed with the termination of aggression to Yemen rather than by inviting foreigners,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. “We are ready to spend our national strength and regional credibility and international authority.”
Those remarks raise the specter of more strikes against Saudi Arabia just days after European officials affirmed the U.S. assessment that Tehran is responsible for the Sept. 14 attack on Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, Aramco. Rouhani rejected the conclusion while taking a defiant tone throughout his speech, snuffing weeks of speculation that he might meet with President Trump while in New York.
“Our response to any negotiation under sanctions is ‘negative,’” Rouhani said, through a UN translator.
Trump held out the prospect of a conversation with Rouhani on Tuesday, hours after pledging that his administration would continue to tighten the sanctions renewed following the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. European leaders echoed Trump’s denunciation of the Iranian attack, notwithstanding their previous frustration with his decision to exit a pact they support.
“The evidence is clear, and there is no plausible alternative explanation,” Dominic Raab, the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, said Wednesday. “This conduct amounts to an armed attack on Saudi Arabia, a violation of one of the basic principles of international law under the United Nations Charter.”
Rouhani, however, framed the attack as merely a spillover from the war in Yemen where Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition allied with the internationally recognized government against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels who claimed responsibility for the strikes.
Rouhani’s speech featured multiple hints that such incidents will continue, despite those European rebukes and Trump’s decision to deploy air and missile defense forces to Saudi Arabia in response to the Sept. 14 attack.
“Security shall not be supplied with American weapons and intervention,” Rouhani said. “Our region is on the edge of collapse, as a single blunder can fuel a big fire. We shall not tolerate the provocative intervention of foreigners.”
Iran has staged a series of attacks over the summer, which Western analysts have assessed are calibrated to startle Europeans into providing economic and diplomatic assistance without provoking a major retaliation. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking Wednesday at an event on the sidelines of the General Assembly, cited the consensus around Iran’s responsibility for the Aramco attacks as a turning point in that effort to jockey for leverage.
“This is the beginning of an awakening — to the truth that Iran is the aggressor and not the aggrieved,” Pompeo said in New York at a summit hosted by United Against Nuclear Iran.
