US committed to countering Iran’s malign behaviour
US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Peek has affirmed Washington’s commitment to crack down Iran’s increasingly malign activities in the region.
In an interview with the Bahrain
News Agency, Peek said the US was working with its Gulf allies to bring
Iran to the bargaining table, halt its support of military proxies and terrorism and the proliferation of missiles.
“The discussion in particular highlighted the ways in which Iran attempts to destabilise and provoke conflict in Bahrain through proxies that have their headquarters abroad, other key personnel abroad, and that work to cause cleavages in Bahraini society,” he told BNA during a brief visit to Bahrain as part of his regional tour. In May, US President Donald Trump announced the US was withdrawing from a nuclear deal with Iran.
“Since then, we have been on an intense diplomatic engagement with our allies and partners to both explain our strategy and to win their support for it,” he said. “One of the problems of the nuclear deal was that we were effectively prevented from sanctioning key individuals, key networks, because either their sanctions had been lifted pursuant to the nuclear deal and thus we could not re-sanction them because of their ties to terrorism — for example the Iranian Central Bank — but also that when we look at activities like Iranian disruption of Bahrain and Iranian attitudes towards Bahrain, we could not impose strategic economic sanctions sufficient enough to cause the Iranians to have to choose: you could either do your malign regional activities or you can have a healthy, thriving economy, but you can’t have both.”