Iran tested a ballistic missile capable of delivering multiple nuclear warheads throughout the Middle East and into Europe, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Saturday.
“As we have been warning for some time, Iran’s missile testing and missile proliferation is growing,” Pompeo said in a bulletin on the test. “We are accumulating risk of escalation in the region if we fail to restore deterrence.”
That’s technical rhetoric for the possibility that Iran will feel emboldened to take even more aggressive actions in the region, eventually triggering a broader conflict. And the launch comes just days before Pompeo travels to Europe to meet the top diplomats of every NATO member, including the European officials who opposed President Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal, so the launch will likely play into his defense of the American position in Brussels.
“This test violates U.N. Security Council resolution 2231 that bans Iran from undertaking ‘any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology,’” Pompeo said, referring to the resolution that implemented the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Pompeo’s team already has been laying the groundwork for a debate over Iran at the meeting in Brussels next week. Brian Hook, the special envoy for Iran, cited the development of ballistic missiles in a Thursday briefing in Washington.
“The regime’s pace of missile launches did not diminish after implementation of the Iran nuclear deal in January of 2016,” Hook told reporters. “Its suspected range is over 1,200 miles, which is far enough to target some European capitals. Iran’s ongoing missile development puts Europe in its range.”
European leaders angered Pompeo in September by agreeing to provide Iran with a Special Purpose Vehicle to circumvent U.S. sanctions by facilitiating transactions that most banks won’t touch. The effort to implement that tactic has fallen short of their hopes so far, in part because of hesitance to defy the sanctions that Trump imposed on Iran’s oil industry.
“The SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle for trade) is important, but what’s more important to the Iranians is oil and ensuring their exports in the long term,” a senior French diplomat told Reuters. “None of the measures that we’re trying to put in place will perform miracles, but what we’re trying to do is a series of measures to convince the Iranians to keep to their nuclear commitments. That is our objective.”
European Union leaders credit the Iran deal with defusing a nuclear crisis that might have force the West to choose shortly between war or allowing the Shia Muslim regime to establish itself as a nuclear power in the Middle East.
“For Europe, preserving the nuclear agreement with Iran is about preventing another conflict in an already troubled region — a conflict that could flood Europe with a new wave of refugees,” Bijan Ahmadi and Younes Zangiabadi, a pair of Canadian-Iranian policy experts, wrote last week at the Atlantic Council. “Moreover, the failure to preserve the Iran deal would significantly undermine the sovereignty of the EU and its ability to enter international agreements independent of the United States.”
The latest missile launch will play into U.S. counterarguments that the deal isn’t worth preserving in its current form.
“Our pressure campaign … yield[s] two very, very concrete benefits: One, it will starve the regime of the revenue it needs to destabilize the Middle East and terrorize other nations,” Hook said. “The other thing it does is it creates pressure on the regime to come back to the negotiating table so that we can get a new and better deal that doesn’t just address the nuclear threat that Iran presents, but also addresses the entire range: the terrorism, the nuclear threat, the cyber aggression, maritime aggression, the entire range. And we are very confident that we have the right strategy with the right diplomacy in place.”
