Trump’s Iran czar to ‘Post’: Iran’s weak, sanctions and protests work
WASHINGTON – Domestic protests across Iran combined with US pressure and continued economic sanctions are weakening the Islamic regime and could, together, lead Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
to change his policies, the Trump administration’s top envoy for Iran Brian Hook told The Jerusalem Post.
“We have weakened the regime dramatically,” Hook said. “We’ve weakened their proxies, and we have disrupted and deterred many Iranian operations. Now, President [Donald] Trump has taken [Qasem] Soleimani off the battlefield. He was the glue that really held together Iran’s proxies in the gray zone so effectively. And we think that his death is much more likely to make the region more stable.”
In light of recent protests in
Iran, and given the US administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, Hook said that the Iranian regime now has “very few options, and all of them are bad.”
The American sanctions are “starving the regime of the revenue it needs to fund its proxies at historic levels,” Hook said. During the Obama nuclear deal, he said, “the regime was rich and so were its proxies. When the proxies have less money and the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism has less money, it means fewer attacks.”
“That does not mean that we have eliminated the asymmetric dimension of modern terrorism. There will always
be risk of attacks, but we have put in place a foreign policy that is weakening the regime and its proxies, and the regime knows it,” he said.
Hook called on the United Kingdom, France and Germany to follow up their decision to initiate a dispute mechanism in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal with additional sanctions.
“If followed to its logical conclusion, [it] would result in the snapback of UN sanctions and the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal,” he explained.
“The president is looking for a much stronger deal that certainly would prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon,” Hook continued. “The JCPOA is a modest and temporary nonproliferation plan that expires. So we’re looking for a much stronger deal that addresses all of Iran’s threats to peace and security.
“Israel has been an amazing partner with the United States, trying to reverse the gains that Iran made under the Iran nuclear deal and restore deterrence.”
Hook voiced optimism that the street protests in Iran, combined with the US sanctions, would lead to a change in policy in Tehran.
“Right now, you have the Iranian people putting pressure on the regime from the bottom up. Our maximum pressure is putting pressure on the regime from the top down. This has left the regime with very few options, and all of them are bad,” he said. “And so at some point, the supreme leader, we hope, will start making better decisions for the Iranian people and for the Middle East.”
Either way, he said, the US would keep up its strategy of restoring deterrence, weakening the regime and its proxies, standing with the Iranian people “and using defensive military force whenever we are attacked.”
Hook dismissed criticism by Democrat lawmakers who claimed that the classified intelligence briefing they received did not reveal any indication of an imminent Iranian strike against US targets, contrary to the president’s claims.
“Our intelligence was very solid,” he said. “I saw the intelligence, and the intelligence was very clear that Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks against American diplomats and soldiers in the region that were large-scale, mass casualty attacks.
“When a man like Soleimani
is planning operations, you can’t forget that he’s the same man who murdered over 600 Americans in Iraq, and we take his operations very seriously.
“If we had done nothing and he had killed hundreds of people, the press would be asking me, ‘Why didn’t we kill Soleimani when we had the chance?’” •