Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is preparing to force the renewal of all international sanctions on Iran in order to bar the regime from purchasing conventional weapons this fall.
“We’re not going to let that happen,” Pompeo told reporters Wednesday. “We are going to make sure that, come October of this year, the Iranians aren’t able to buy conventional weapons that they would be given, what President Obama and Vice President Biden delivered to the world in that terrible deal.”
Pompeo is trying to extend the embargo on conventional weapons sales to Tehran, a restriction that is scheduled to expire in October, according to the terms of the United Nations Security Council resolution that ratified the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The potential danger of such weapons sales could attract European support for Pompeo’s initiative, but that partnership is complicated by lingering anger over the U.S. withdrawal from the accord.
“It’s now just several months out where China, Russia, other countries from around the world can all sell significant conventional weapons systems to the Iranians in October of this year,” Pompeo said. “I think the world realizes that’s a mistake.”
The options for how to extend the arms embargo are limited, given that Russia or China could veto a new resolution banning such sales. Their expected recalcitrance leaves one alternative, according to Iran hawks: an allegation that Iran has violated the nuclear deal, culminating in the snapback of all international sanctions in place before the implementation of the 2015 deal.
“We’re urging our E3 partners to take action, which is within their capacity to do,” Pompeo said, referring to the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. “We’ll work with the U.N. Security Council to extend that prohibition on those arms sales. And then, in the event we can’t get anyone else to act, the United States is evaluating every possibility about how we might do that.”
“You cannot cherry-pick a resolution saying you implement only parts of it but you won’t do it for the rest,” a Western diplomat involved in the allied deliberations told Agence France-Presse.
Iran hawks think that legal argument doesn’t hold any water. “Someone suggested this is fancy lawyering,” Pompeo said. “It’s just reading.”
The snapback process, this argument emphasizes, is governed by a U.N. Security Council resolution, not by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the 2015 deal is known.
That means that the total demise of the 2015 agreement could be just a few months away. “The only other option is a new arms embargo resolution, which Russia and China would veto, and then, we’ll lose,” a congressional Republican aide who follows Iran issues told the Washington Examiner.
