Secretary of State Mike Pompeo initiated the snapback of international sanctions on Iran despite the objections of European allies who maintain that the United States has no legal right to do so.
“These U.N. sanctions will continue the arms embargo,” Pompeo said at the United Nations, referring to the ban that is scheduled to expire in October pursuant to the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal. “No country but the U.S. has had the courage and conviction to put forward a resolution.”
That maneuver fulfills a threat that Pompeo repeatedly made throughout the last year as he sought to persuade the U.N. Security Council to prevent the expiration of the arms embargo. And it exacerbates the dispute over the Iran deal that has festered between President Trump’s administration and key European allies, who declared Thursday that Pompeo lacks standing to turn U.S. policies into actions at the Security Council.
“The US ceased to be a participant to the JCPOA following their withdrawal from the deal on May 8, 2018,” top diplomats from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom said in a joint statement on Thursday, using an acronym for the nuclear deal. “We cannot therefore support this action, which is incompatible with our current efforts to support the JCPOA.”
Pompeo rejected that assessment Thursday, maintaining that the Security Council resolution was written in a way that identifies the U.S. as a “participant” in the deal regardless of Trump’s decision to withdraw.
“It says this set of states has the right to execute snapback. it doesn’t require compliance,” Pompeo told reporters. “If it wanted to say, ‘You may execute snapback if and only if’ and place a condition, it knows how to do that.”
Those contradictory positions raise the prospect of procedural duels at the Security Council over the next month.
“We remain guided by the objective of upholding the authority and integrity of the United Nations Security Council,” the diplomats’ statement said. “We call on all UNSC members to refrain from any action that would only deepen divisions in the Security Council or that would have serious adverse consequences on its work.”
Proponents of the snapback believe that the existing rules governing those fights guarantee that the U.S. can proceed unilaterally, but the controversy could prove poisonous within the transatlantic alliance.
“The United States will be carefully watching and remembering which of our partners and allies stand with us,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Thursday.
Pompeo invoked that the French, German, and British acknowledgment that Iran is in violation of the deal in a letter to the U.N. earlier Thursday.
“Yet despite extensive efforts an exhaustive diplomacy on the part of those member states, Iran’s significant non-performance persists,” Pompeo said in the letter. “Iran’s significant non-performance is incontestable and a matter of public record.”
European allies fear that Iran will expel international inspectors and chart a rapid course toward the development of nuclear weapons if the deal collapses utterly.
“In order to preserve the agreement, we urge Iran to reverse all measures inconsistent with its nuclear commitments and return to full compliance without delay,” the joint statement said.
