Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is warning that if the Biden administration’s policy on Iran continues, the rogue Islamic regime “will, one day, hold the world hostage to its nuclear ambitions.”
“You can feel it. The Biden administration is preparing to underwrite the Iranian regime and appease its mayhem and murder on the same theory that it did in 2015: ‘Pay Them and Enter the JCPOA or There Will Be War,'” he said in commentary for the American Center for Law and Justice, where he is senior counsel for global affairs.
The JCPOA is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal brokered by the Obama administration and other nations in which billions of dollars in frozen assets was released to the Islamic regime.
“This asserted logic provided a seemingly powerful message for Americans who didn’t want their sons and daughters fighting in the Middle East,” he said of the agreement. “It was repeated over and over and over by John Kerry, Wendy Sherman, and Robert Malley until many came to wrongly believe this binary set of American policy options represented the only two ways to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapon.”
Today, he wrote, it’s the “same cast of characters” that appears to be getting ready to “capitulate and permit the funding of Iranian terror, assassination, missile building, and massive antisemitism.”
“If it does, the Ayatollah Khamenei will, one day, hold the world hostage to its nuclear ambitions,” Pompeo said.
The past four years, he said, have exposed the fact that the JCPOA “was a false set of choices.”
The deal, he said, was based on four fundamental false assertions.
“First, if there is no JCPOA, there will be war. We left the JCPOA. There is no war,” he wrote.
The second falsehood is that American sanctions alone can’t stop Iran from selling crude oil. But U.S. sanctions withheld hundreds of billions of dollars from the regime.
The JCPOA also held that Iran would “come clean about its nuclear program’s history.”
But he said Iran still refuses to allow inspections at nuclear sites. “What else are they concealing about their nuclear program?”
Finally, he said, the JCPOA was supposed to lead to a bigger deal, for peace.
Instead, the Iranians “made clear there was never to be nor would there ever be a discussion regarding missiles or terror if the deal is in place,” he said.
Pompeo said real progress in the Middle East came when the U.S. pulled out of the JCPOA, and going back won’t help.
“Keep in mind, the concessions to Iran may not be pallets of cash this time. That relief could come in the additional lifting of sanctions. Iran’s terror arm in Yemen has already been declared not to be terrorists, and the Trump administration’s successful effort to extend the JCPOA ban on Iranian arms sales and purchase, that was set at just five years, has been jettisoned,” he said.
“Or they might allow billions of dollars to flow to the Iranian regime from assets frozen and prohibited from transiting to Iran by the Trump Administration – the Republic of Korea alone has several billion dollars it is anxious to hand over to Iran.”
Without “powerful sanctions” alongside “a credible threat of military force,” Iran’s religious leaders never will give up their plans for nuclear weapons, and regional domination, Pompeo said.
“Capitulation will not change Iranian behavior. Doing so would be a mistake for the security of the American people, our Israeli and Gulf State friends, and, just as assuredly, for the good people of Iran who are looking for the world to act so as to diminish the power of the Iranian regime to steal from them, shoot them, and deny them their most basic freedoms.”
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