CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s emergence as the next secretary of state foreshadows a toughening U.S. position on the Iran nuclear deal, administration critics and allies agree.
President Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and tapped Pompeo to be the nation’s lead diplomat in one motion Tuesday, just days after agreeing to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to discuss a rollback of the regime’s nuclear weapons program. But Pompeo’s arrival might have a more immediate influence on a parallel nuclear issue: the negotiations that will determine whether the U.S. withdraws from the Iran nuclear deal in May.
“He stands to give the U.S. additional credibility to the option of nixing the deal, because he had talked about how this deal is a bad deal quite a bit,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner.
Trump faces a May deadline either to renew the sanctions that then-President Barack Obama waived when the Iran deal was struck, which would amount to a U.S. abandonment of the pact, or to maintain the Obama era policy. Trump has demanded that American and European officials develop a plan to restrain Iran’s ballistic missile program, enhance international inspections of the regime’s nuclear research facilities, and limit the scope of Iran’s nuclear program so that the regime “never even comes close to possessing a nuclear weapon,” as he put it in January.
“This is a last chance,” Trump said in January. “In the absence of such an agreement, the United States will not again waive sanctions in order to stay in the Iran nuclear deal. And if at any time I judge that such an agreement is not within reach, I will withdraw from the deal immediately.”
Pompeo’s transition to the State Department puts one of the harshest congressional critics of the Iran deal in the lead on those negotiations. He tried to block a vote on the review of the deal after discovering, along with Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the existence of “side deals” between Iran and international monitors during an oversight trip to the International Atomic Energy Agency. He also argued that the pact was not legally binding, because it was never signed.
“If Pompeo has not moderated his views, it means that one of the most ideological opponents of diplomacy with Iran may soon be in charge of implementing Trump’s efforts to exit the nuclear agreement in May,” the National Iranian American Council, which supports the agreement, said Tuesday. “That would only make Trump’s demand that Europe join his administration in violating the Iran nuclear deal in order to save it even less appealing.”
Iran hawks disagree, precisely because he has a more hawkish policy than Tillerson. “I think that you’re going to see the State Department play a much more assertive role in terms of applying pressure on America’s European allies to step up to the plate,” the Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner told the Washington Examiner.
Tillerson notably advocated for remaining in the deal and opposed Trump’s new approach. He also emphasized that Trump wouldn’t try “to interfere with business deals that the Europeans may have under way with Iran,” an apparent softening of the threat to renew sanctions on Iran.
“The reality is that for many of the big European actors, there are huge financial interests at stake, and so they are very resistant to doing anything,” Gardiner said.
That might change if the Europeans regard Pompeo as someone who is likely to stoke Trump’s desire to see the deal scrapped, Iran hawks argue.
“Perhaps we can get the EU to take substantial action,” Ben Taleblu said. “The Europeans have more of an incentive to meet the Americans more than halfway on the diplomatic front. Because, if you believe personnel is policy, then there is a more credible case for a walk-out or a nix option than ever before.”
