SecState Pompeo on Possible Compromises with Iran: ‘Should We Allow Them to be Terrorists?’
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a briefing with reporters on Tuesday following the White House briefing and President Donald Trump‘s joint South Korea presser, and had a surprising answer about compromise.
Pompeo fielded questions first about the North Korea summit’s fate, and then moved on to the other major foreign policy issue facing State, the Iran Deal.
Reporter Michelle Kosinski of CNN asked Pompeo about the demands the U.S. has laid out for Iran, and whether they left any room for compromise. Pompeo’s response was direct and firmly in sound bite territory.
KOSINSKI: “The demands, or whatever you want to call them, that you laid out for Iran yesterday. It seems like, partially because you laid them all out and partially because of what they are, there’s not going to be much room for negotiation, if any, on any of those. Would you agree with that? And because of the way that was put out there, what makes you think that Iran is going to be willing to work with the U.S. on this? If it’s sanctions, wouldn’t that take a very long time at this point?”
POMPEO: “I don’t know which of those demands. Should we allow them to be terrorists? Is that one we should compromise on? Should we, how many missiles are they allowed to fire? I mean I, the answer is the benchmark I set forward yesterday is a very low standard. It’s the standard of behavior we expect from countries all around the world. There aren’t a special set of rules that we set forward yesterday for Iran. We simply asked them to behave in a way normal, non-belligerent nations behave. That’s it. It’s simple. There’s not a special category of people who are permitted to fire missiles into Riyadh. We just asked them to behave like a normal nation.”
Pompeo went on to say that he has “every reason to think” that the people of Iran likewise want their own nation to stop taking part in such activity, and notably took a page from the George W. Bush nation-building playbook.
“I’m convinced that the people of Iran, when they can see a path forward which will lead their country to stop behaving in this way, will choose that path.”
Whether Trump partisans view that statement as intolerably neocon or “globalist” remains to be seen, but it certainly has echoes of Bush-era foreign policy posture, with its focus on active promotion of democracy and American interest abroad and in the Middle East in particular.
Pompeo’s demands of Iran were delivered in a speech on Monday. You can read them here.
[image via screengrab]
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