The United States is moving to reissue a full round of U.N. sanctions against Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Thursday, in the Trump administration’s latest move to erase the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Pompeo said the U.S. will issue the sanctions to essentially extend an arms embargo on Iran, even after the United Nations Security Council voted to let the arms embargo expire this fall. Pompeo had expressed his intention to reapply sanctions Wednesday by invoking a snapback measure in the deal negotiated by the Obama administration that allows participants to reimpose sanctions on Iran.
“The United States will never allow the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism to freely buy and sell planes, tanks, missiles and other kinds of conventional weapons,” Pompeo told reporters at the United Nations. “These U.N. sanctions will continue the arms embargo.”
Some of Pompeo’s counterparts in Germany, France and the United Kingdom have argued the United States is no longer in a position to invoke the snapback option since it left the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018. The White House has retorted that the terms of the 2015 agreement still give the U.S. a hand to play in invoking U.N. sanctions on Iran.
The disagreement is likely to provoke a showdown in the Security Council, where the U.S. and some other signatories to the deal all have veto power. Shortly after the council voted against extending an arms embargo on Iran, Russia’s delegation announced that its president, Vladimir Putin, had invited the heads of Iran, Germany and UNSC member countries to “outline steps that can prevent confrontation or a spike in tensions in the UN Security Council.”
Israel, however, has been wholly supportive of Pompeo’s move. The country has long been critical of the nuclear deal, viewing Iran as an existential threat to its security.
“Not honoring the biding snapback mechanism … threatens to undermine the Security Council’s effectiveness and its ability to uphold international peace and security,” said Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan in a video statement. “Reimposing the U.N. sanctions on Iran is a critical step to curbing Iranian aggression, which threatens the entire world.”
Trump has long decried the nuclear deal as a “disaster” and prioritized its dismantling early in his presidency. Pompeo told reporters Wednesday that U.N. sanctions never should have been lifted on Iran, saying they were “temporarily paused” by the nuclear deal.
The U.S. has already imposed a slate of sanctions on Iranian agents and institutions, as well as other foreign entities that do business with the country.