White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said that the administration was “very pleased” that Iran had turned over the ten U.S. Navy sailors it had detained and he credited Secretary of State John Kerry’s engagement with the country as instrumental in their release.
“Secretary Kerry’s aggressive and early engagement in this and [the] open channel he had — and he has — with his foreign minister countererpart [in Iran] was important … I do think the open lines of communication, which are relatively new, are extraordinarily important,” McDonough told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday.
McDonough’s comments came just hours after Iran released the sailors, who were first detained Tuesday night, just prior to President Obama’s final State of the Union address. Iran alleged that the sailors had drifted into their territorial waters. The news of their detention was an embarassment for the administration, which made nuclear diplomacy with Iran a centerpiece of its foreign policy.
Obama’s chief of staff said he was “hestitant to draw any big lesssons” from the incident because all of the facts were not in and U.S. authorities were still looking into the details surrounding the incident.
“But one thing I can say with confidence is that this chanel between Secretary Kerry and their foreign minister was very important in resolving this in a timely fashion,” he said.
He added that the Persian Gulf, which is about 93,000 square miles according to Encyclopedia Britannica, is “pretty tight quarters” and a “relatively shallow body of water” and that the U.S. has often come to the aid of Iranian sailors.
“The tradition that the U.S. Navy has of providing for sailors in distress has been pretty evident over the course of the last decade especially over the last several years when we’ve provided support for Iranian sailors in distress. I’m very proud of that tradition of the U.S. Navy. I think there have been several instances of this over the course of the last several years, as I’ve indicated. And I think that it was in that spirit — I’m happy to see that to see that this was resolved relatively quickly,” he said.
