U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected to roll out a new U.S. strategy on the Iranian nuclear issue at the Heritage Institute think tank in Washington on Monday.
Pompeo is scheduled to deliver a speech titled “After the Deal: A New Iran Strategy,” which will be live-streamed on the State Department website.
The New York Times reported Friday that the focus of the new U.S. strategy would be a demand for a new deal that would permanently ban Iran from manufacturing nuclear fuel in any significant amounts, effectively barring Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
According to the newspaper’s analysis, European nations are unlikely to back the new U.S. approach, but Pompeo is betting that President Donald Trump’s policy of harsh economic sanctions will be effective in forcing Iran to come to the negotiating table.
The paper also reported that the U.S. administration is trying to curtail Iran’s ballistic missile program and support of terrorist groups and regimes in the Middle East, including Syria.
Trump announced on May 8 that he was pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal signed between Iran, the U.S., Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China. He has long been a vocal opponent of the agreement, calling it the “worst deal ever.”
“The Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of terror,” Trump said in his address on May 8.
“It exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle East, and supports terrorist proxies and militias such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban and al-Qaida. No action taken by the regime has been more dangerous than its pursuit of nuclear weapons and the means of delivering them.
“In theory, the Iran deal was supposed to protect the United States and our allies from the lunacy of an Iranian nuclear bomb, a weapon that will only endanger the survival of the Iranian regime. In fact, the deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and, over time, reach the brink of a nuclear breakout.
“The deal lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activity, and no limits at all on its other malign behavior.”
He criticized the Obama administration for creating the deal, saying that “at the point when the United States had maximum leverage, this disastrous deal gave this regime many billions of dollars.”
The deal is “a great embarrassment to me and to all citizens of the United States,” he said.