Senior US diplomat Mike Pompeo has used a late-term Middle East tour to cement Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran so that president-elect Joe Biden can’t easily reverse it.
As the Donald Trump era draws to a close, US Secretary of State Pompeo has made containing the Islamic republic a key focus of his trip, and he even refused to rule out a military strike in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.
While Mr Biden has signalled a return to diplomacy with Tehran, Mr Pompeo has insisted Iran is the region’s top threat, in a tour taking in Israel and the United Arab Emirates and concluding in Saudi Arabia — all countries that view Iran through the same hawkish lens.
“This administration … is here until January 20” and will “continue to pursue its policies”, a senior US official travelling with Mr Pompeo said during the stop in Abu Dhabi, which had followed a visit to Qatar’s capital Doha.
“I would hope that this leverage that the (Trump) administration works so hard to get will be used to good purpose to get the Iranians to, once again, start behaving like a normal state.”
Mr Trump, who has refused to concede the bitter US election contest, unilaterally withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers over two years ago, before reimposing crippling sanctions on Tehran.
Read the article by Francesco Fontemaggi in The Australian.