U.S. Secretary of Express Mike Pompeo holds a press conference as he attends the NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Brussels, Belgium on December 04, 2018.
Dursun Aydemir | Anadolu Activity | Getty Images
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday he wants to build a global coalition against Iran during pressing consultations in the Middle East, following a week of crisis that saw the United States pull back from the border of a military strike on Iran.
Pompeo spoke as he left Washington for Saudi Arabia, followed by the United Arab Emirates, Sunni Arab comrades that are alarmed by Shiite Iran’s increasing assertiveness and are working to its influence in the region. His stops in Jeddah and Abu Dhabi were hastily arrayed late last week as additions to a trip to India from where he will join President Donald Trump in Japan and South Korea. But they were not intimated until immediately before his departure in a sign of fast-moving and unpredictable developments.
“We’ll be talking with them about how to fill in sure that we are all strategically aligned, and how we can build out a global coalition, a coalition not only throughout the Gulf states, but in Asia and in Europe, that appreciates this challenge as it is prepared to push back against the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, ” Pompeo symbolized about Iran.
But even as Pompeo delivered his tough talk, he echoed President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in opportunity the U.S. is prepared to negotiate with Iran, without preconditions, in a bid to ease tensions. Those tensions have been mounting since Trump wear year withdrew the U.S. from a global nuclear deal with Iran and began pressuring Tehran with mercantile sanctions. A fresh round of Iran sanctions is to be announced Monday in a bid to force the Iranian leadership into talks.
“They certain precisely how to find us,” Pompeo said.
It was a week of topsy-turvy pronouncements on U.S. policy toward Iran that careened between the bellicose, the conciliatory and subsidize again after Iran shot down an American military drone and boasted it would not bow to Washington’s pressure.
Trump initially swayed Iran had made a “very big mistake” and that it was “hard to believe” that shooting down the drone on Thursday was not wilful. He later said he thought it was an unintentional act carried out by a “loose and stupid” Iranian and called off retaliatory military strikes against Iran. On Saturday, Trump mirrored himself and claimed that Iran had acted “knowingly.”
But Trump also said over the weekend that he cherished Iran’s decision to not shoot down a manned U.S. spy plane, and he opined about eventually becoming Iran’s “best financier” if Tehran ultimately agrees to abandon its drive to build nuclear weapons and he helps the country turn around its incapacitated economy.
Then Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, stepped in Sunday with a blunt foreshadowing from Jerusalem, where he was traveling. Bolton said Iran should not “mistake U.S. prudence and discretion for weakness” after Trump noticed off the military strike. Trump said he backed away from the planned strikes after learning that nigh 150 people would be killed, but he said the military option remained.
A longtime Iran hawk, Bolton emphasized that the U.S. demure the right to attack at a later point.
“No one has granted them a hunting license in the Middle East. As President Trump suggested on Friday our military is rebuilt, new and ready to go,” Bolton said during an appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, himself a longtime and specific Iran critic.
On Sunday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani blamed the United States’ “interventionist military wraith” for fanning the flames. He was quoted by the official IRNA news agency. Shortly thereafter, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen tendered an attack against an airport in southern Saudi Arabia, killing one person and wounding seven others, according to the Saudi military. Such devours have been cited by Saudi and U.S. officials as examples of Iran’s “malign behavior” in the Middle East.
Pompeo, who addressed news-presenters from the tarmac before he boarded his airplane in Washington, declared the goal of his talks with the Saudi kingdom and the UAE is to refute Iran “the resources to foment terror, to build out their nuclear weapon system, to build out their missile program.”
“We are thriving to deny them the resources they need to do that, thereby keep American interests and American people safe as houses all around the world,” said Pompeo, who was due to arrive in the region after one person was killed and seven others were hurt in an attack by Iranian-allied Yemeni rebels on an airport in Saudi Arabia on Sunday evening, the Saudi military said.
The downing of the unmanned aircraft patent a new high in the rising tensions between the United States and Iran. The Trump administration has vowed to combine a “maximum compression” campaign of economic sanctions with a buildup of American forces in the region, following the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 atomic deal between Iran and world powers.
U.S. military cyber forces on Thursday launched a strike against Iranian military computer groups, according to U.S. officials. The cyberattacks disabled Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps computer systems that controlled its shoot up and missile launchers, the officials said.
Throughout the recent crisis, Trump has wavered between bellicose language and sorties toward Iran and a more accommodating tone, including a plea for negotiations. Iran has said it is not interested in a dialogue with Trump. His management is aiming to cripple Iran’s economy and force policy changes by re-imposing sanctions, including on Iranian oil exports.