Defence Secretary Mattis contradicts Trump on Iran deal before crucial deadline
WASHINGTON— Days before U.S. President Donald Trump has to make a critical decision on whether to hold up the Iran nuclear deal, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis openly split with him on abandoning the agreement, the second senior member of the president’s national security team to recently contradict him.
Mattis told senators on Tuesday that it was in America’s interest to stick with the deal, which Trump has often dismissed as a “disaster.”
“Absent indications to the contrary, it is something that the president should consider staying with,” Mattis told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee after being repeatedly pressed on the issue.
The comments were the latest example of how Trump’s instincts on national security — to threaten North Korea with destruction and tear up an Iran accord that most experts and allies say is working — are running headlong into opposition from his own National Security Council. Rather than keep those arguments inside the White House Situation Room, where similar battles have played out over many presidencies, Trump’s key advisers are making no secret of their disagreements with their boss.
Mattis came to office with wellestablished, hawkish views of Iran, whose support of Syria’s government and of Hezbollah, he believed, had cost American lives. But he has always taken the position that if he had to confront Iran, he would rather confront a non-nuclear Iran, and that the agreement was preventing the country from possessing or making enough bomb-grade material for a weapon.
Asked on Capitol Hill on Tuesday whether he had changed his view, Mattis said he supports “the rigorous review that he has got going on right now.”
When that answer did not satisfy the committee, Sen. Angus King, asked whether the defence secretary thought holding onto the nuclear pact is in the interest of the national security of the United States. Mattis, a retired Marine general, paused before replying: “Yes, senator, I do.”
An administration official said that no difference existed between the president’s views and those of his secretary of defence on the Iran deal.
But the evident dissonance between the president and his senior national security advisers has taken on greater consequence in the cases of Iran and North Korea, which are potentially questions of war or peace.