TRUMP TO GET TOUGH ON IRAN

US president expected not to certify 2015 agreement to counter Teheran’s ‘activities’

PRESIDENT Donald Trump will outline a tougher United States strategy for countering Iran that will seek to strengthen the enforcement of what he considers a flawed nuclear deal and deny funding for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“It is time for the entire world to join us in demanding that Iran’s government end its pursuit of death and destruction,” Trump said in a White House statement that laid out key elements of the strategy.

Trump is to deliver a speech to announce a confrontational new approach to US policy towards Iran.

In a big shift, he is expected to say he will not certify Iran’s compliance with a 2015 nuclear accord negotiated by world powers, including Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.

The new strategy will include three key goals: Fixing the nuclear deal to make it harder for Iran to develop a weapon, addressing its ballistic missile programme and countering Iranian activities that Washington says contribute to instability in the Middle East.

As the administration announced its plan for Iran, Republican Senators Bob Corker and Tom Cotton said they had developed legislation intended to address what they saw as deficiencies in the Iran nuclear deal.

They offered a plan to automatically reimpose sanctions if Iran’s nuclear programme were to get to a point where Teheran could develop a nuclear weapon in less than one year, known as a “breakout” period.

In Moscow, the TASS news agency yesterday cited Iranian Parliament speaker Ali Larijani as saying that if the US leaves the nuclear deal, this will be the end of this international agreement.

Larijani, in the Russian city of St Petersburg for an international parliamentary forum, also said that Washington’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal could lead to global chaos.

Iran hopes that Russia will play a role in resolving the situation around the nuclear deal, Larijani said when meeting Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Duma lower house of Russia’s Parliament. Reuters