Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will soon unveil “a comprehensive strategy toward Iran” in the wake of the U.S. exit from the 2015 nuclear deal, the State Department announced Friday.
Pompeo will outline the plan in a Monday speech intended to rally European allies around the idea of using sanctions to force Iran into new negotiations over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. But that “new security architecture” will be built with an eye toward defending against the regime’s involvement in two civil wars and support for terrorism.
“Our broad approach now that we’ve been emphasizing is that we need… a framework that’s going to address the totality of Iran’s threats,” Brian Hook, the director of policy planning at the State Department, told reporters.
European leaders might not be very receptive. Hook’s announcement came hours after the European Commission moved to protect companies and banks that invest in Iran from U.S. sanctions. The policy raises the possibility that the Treasury Department will have to consider sanctioning even European government banks, if they follow through on discussions about facilitating deals with the sanctioned Central Bank of Iran.
“We think that we’ve been able to make a lot of progress on the range of issues on the nuclear and security sort of objectives,” Hook said of discussions with European allies. “And so we have a period of opportunity to work with our allies to try to come up with a new security architecture, a new framework, and I think that, again, people, I think, are overstating the disagreements between the U.S. and Europe.”
President Trump’s administration and European allies, perhaps most notably French President Emmanuel Macron, have a shared concern about Iran’s aggression in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. But European proposals to counter Iran have been premised on the survival of the nuclear deal, which the allies credit with defusing a nuclear crisis.
“As long as the Iranians respect their commitments, the EU will of course stick to the agreement of which it was an architect,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said. “But the American sanctions will not be without effect. So we have the duty, the Commission and the European Union, to do what we can to protect our European businesses, especially [small and medium-sized enterprises].”
Pompeo’s proposal depends on the economic isolation of Iran. “It was economic pressure that brought the Iranians to the table a few years ago,” Hook said. “We very much want a diplomatic outcome, one that is going to increase the security of the American people . . . And so the goal of our effort is to bring all necessary pressure to bear on Iran to change its behavior and to pursue a new framework that can resolve our concerns. And that’s what we’re going to be discussing.”
