Trump, top aides raise heat on Iran
But critics call verbal attacks attempt to distract from Russia
WASHINGTON — In an abrupt escalation of tensions with Iran, President Donald Trump is threatening the Islamic Republic unless it changes its ways, in concert with senior advisers who are speaking out on separate fronts.
Critics i mmediately branded the threats as Trump’s attempt to divert attention from widespread, bipartisan criticism of his troubled dealings with Russia, which has only grown since last week’s Helsinki summit with President Vladimir Putin and amid attention to the upcoming trial of his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
But in contrast to the Russia controversy, where Trump’s embrace of Putin has seemed at cross-purposes with the tough policies of his own administration, senior U.S. officials echoed the president on Sunday and Monday by their tough talk, just weeks before the administration plans to slap strict economic sanctions on the country.
In a blistering tweet, Trump wrote shortly before midnight Sunday in Washington, “To Iranian President Rouhani,” and then hit his caps-lock button for the message:
“NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.”
Trump was apparently responding to a speech earlier Sunday by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in which the Iranian warned of a “mother of all wars” if the United States attacked.
“Mr. Trump, don’t play with the lion’s tail,” Rouhani warned. He also said, however, that peaceful ties between the two countries could be the “mother of all peace.”
Though Trump may have been replying to Rouhani, the tweet came as part of an overall administration escalation of verbal attacks on Iran. On Sunday evening in Simi Valley, Calif., Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech denouncing what he called Tehran’s “Mafia” government and pledging support for Iranians who would challenge it.
Pompeo said Iran’s clerics and “hypocritical holy men” run a kleptocracy that enriches them while impoverishing ordinary Iranians, all the while quashing domestic opponents and promoting terrorism abroad.
And on Monday, John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, echoed Trump’s tweet in similar words. The president “told me that if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid before,” Bolton, a longtime hawk, said in a statement.
Trump’s tweet was reminiscent of his threats, issued at just about this time last summer, to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against a nuclear-armed North Korea if it attacked U.S. territory.
Since then, however, Trump has embarked on a rapprochement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the still-unfulfilled quest to begin to denuclearize the Shoppers stroll through the old main bazaar in Tehran on Monday. The U.S. is threatening wider sanctions against Iran to further pressure its fragile economy. Korean Peninsula. The two leaders met at a one-day summit in Singapore in June in which Trump made a major concession to Kim — canceling joint military exercises with South Korea — and received little if anything in return.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders would not say whether Trump consulted his national security team before the tweet. She blamed the escalation on Iran.
“If anybody’s inciting anything, look no further than to Iran,” she said.
The Iran tensions come after Trump withdrew the United States from an agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear activities — an international pact signed in 2015 that the administration hopes to unravel.
Tehran was abiding by the terms of the nuclear agreement, but Trump said that pact didn’t go far enough. He said he wants to confront all of Tehran’s “malign behavior,” such as support for regional militant groups, in addition to thwarting the country’s nuclear potential.
Christopher Hill, a veteran diplomat in Republican and Democratic administrations, said Trump’s hostile rhetoric toward Iran was “raw meat” for his political base and “an effort to shift the subject” away from the Putin summit.
“Things have not gone well and this idea that he’s a tough guy has really frayed,” Hill said. “Sure, he’s been tough on Canada and Germany, but he looked weak when he was face to face with Putin. This looks like an effort to tell his base, ‘I really am tough.’ ”
The U.S. will unilaterally reimpose economic sanctions on Iran in a few weeks and has demanded, so far unsuccessfully, that other nations stop all imports of Iranian oil.
Several European allies, who are seeking to keep the Iran agreement alive, have sought waivers from the sanctions.